There’s a photograph of an empty bookshelf that I took several years ago, and I’ve been wanting to complete it somehow. Today I actually posted it on instagram for a few minutes, writing something sarcastic about Marie Kondo in the caption, but then I deleted it. Photos of nothing are a delicate breed, they can easily fall flat, but if handled well they deliver my favorite kind of photographic experiences. At one end of photography, and I’m thinking mostly images like studio still lives, there is a great formal pleasure in the composition, weight, and texture. At the other end, and now I’m thinking mostly of journalistic or documentary images, the photograph carries centuries of history within it, violence, oppression, and maybe justice. How can I put this succinctly? How can I write it without losing whatever mystery existed in my head?
My favorite kind of photographic experiences happen when a picture seems completely open ended, rudely so at first. I wonder what laziness compelled this artist to produce such a work, and what audacity allowed them to place the burden of interpretation on me, the viewer. But then I read something, or I hear something, or I go out in the world and I see something, and inside of me the image slowly develops a meaningfulness. Thanks to whatever insecurities I hold onto, my first reaction to work that doesn’t look like my own is often critical, but great power lies in one’s ability to control that shift toward criticality or praise. A good teacher has this talent, they can read the room and intentionally exercise empathy with the artist. A good teacher will generously offer up their creative response to the work by following a train of thought that began with something right there in the frame, but through the same process they may offer a criticism to someone whose confidence would otherwise grow unchecked. I’ve heard of Australia’s culture of “Tall Poppy Syndrome,” where those individuals who grow too big are quickly brought down, and I’m not advocating for that per se It’s just that I know there is a balance and it takes a wisdom to maintain.
In relation to my photograph of an empty bookshelf, what I wanted to say about Marie Kondo came from a place of stripping away the unnecessary. In that sense, the bookshelf feels timely and political, it is the hole where a monument to xyz slaveholder used to stand. I wonder just how many books on my shelf perpetuate the perspective of the white male? Shouldn’t I take them all down, examine each book and it’s biases carefully, and put back only those that will help me build a better and more equitable future?
I made the photograph when my brother was moving out of his place in San Francisco. One way I’ve considered completing the picture is by printing it on a lightweight paper that floats easily with any passing motion in the air. When I move into a new place I will make this the very first photograph to go up on the wall, and it would have to be the only one for some time. It would remind me to go carefully into every decision about what to bring into the space and where it might live. But this photograph is better off untethered to architecture, the bookshelf is analogous to the mind in the same way that a computer hard drive is. These are structures that allow for a system of storage and retrieval. I confess I meditate - I care about mindfulness, call me cliche! But I do feel a deep-seated understanding of Nam Jun Paik’s Zen for Film, 1964, an empty 16 mm projection, and in my bones I have experienced the benefits of what nothingness has to teach. To steer back to the bookshelf and “my favorite kind of photographic experiences,” this nothingness is where we start and where we end in a photograph. As the author of this empty bookshelf, I have experienced innumerable meanings from the image, I allow myself to follow a golden thread but in time I let it go. I am left then with a photograph of an empty bookshelf. It is merely a plot of sand, where words have been written but washed away, where every new visitor may enjoy the essential pleasure of thinking responses through language, each in their own unique way.
