These days so much reaches us through television, magazines, and newspapers that it is easy to forget that the photographs we see–and often take as an objective interpretation of reality–are only one way of looking at the world. Yet the fact that a person needs to aim a camera, to frame a scene, before taking a picture makes for an inherent bias. John Pfahl’s photography deliberately reminds us of that bias.
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In Red Arrow three trees stand before large boulders. Red dots create an arrow pointing away from the viewer; the central line is placed on the middle trunk, while the dots creating the arrow’s angled lines fall on the other two trees and the boulders. Logically, each successive dot should be farther away, and the head of the arrow should be farthest; but it is actually on the middle tree, closer than the dots on the boulders. Pfahl’s work is clever enough that some of these photographs look like they were made from negatives the photographer altered in the darkroom. But that deceptive appearance is exactly where the trickery comes in; things are not what they first appear.
Take for example “Smoke,” a series of beautiful color prints that show clouds billowing out the tops of factory smokestacks. We know that such smoke smells bad, we know it may be unhealthy to breathe, we don’t want it in our neighborhood. And yet these photographs are lovely to look at. Sunlight transforms the clouds into delicately colored billows. The richness of yellow, orange, and gray occasionally rivals that of J.M.W. Turner’s later paintings. And because Pfahl has left in the smokestacks–though they are typically relegated to a corner of the frame–we get a vivid sense of dynamic motion from the plume rushing out of the stack. The landscape–or skyscape, I suppose–is lovely but (a voice speaks from the back of the mind) dangerous too.
The most drastic tool we have for altering the landscape is the nuclear weapon, and Pfahl comments on that technology in the series “Missile/Glyphs.” Each of these pieces juxtaposes two images, one depicting in loving detail the surface of a modern bomb or missile, the other reproducing petroglyphs etched or drawn centuries ago on the rock walls of the American southwest. There are remarkable formal similarities, as when a sizable herd of petroglyphs depicting horned animals (bighorn sheep, perhaps) mirrors the busy pattern of rivets on the gleaming fuselage of a cruise missile. In Minuteman Missile/Galisteo Basin Petroglyphs a cryptic arrow straddling a long sinuous line (is it a snake, or a boundary between two worlds?) leads the eye to the cone of the missile perched at the top of the frame. Here again it is Pfahl’s framing that determines what we see–who would otherwise have thought to see ancient art and missiles in the same light?
