Look Here New Work by Nearby Artists (2)

Eric Litke

There are vagaries of light too brief for us to register, collateral damage from the glare and rush of our motion in the world, both night and day. Eric Litke is compiling an atlas of those moments in a series of Polaroid images that he began making last year.

There is something about the medium which is both fragile and irreproducible, making it particularly fitting for Litke’s subjects. Each image is solitary and unique, lacking a negative that would have the same relationship to the original that a library catalogue entry has to the book it records; evidence that it exists, but no substitute for its meaning.

What is diffused and blurred here reminds us that the indefinite is accurate. We see – or don’t – this way. That is why the current technology of high definition is so painful to look at; its precision is unnatural, like a Durer self-portrait desperate for its subject to be spared from rot.

There are narratives of absence in many of these photographs, as if something has just moved out of view, some brief encounter that leaves a trace of unease even though no longer visible. Not a crime always, if ever, but meant to be secret. It is as if these were souvenirs of privacy, made more precious by their rarity in our so public time.

In an earlier conventional photograph, Litke discovered a cemetery at the edge of things, where civilization is marked by sodium vapor lamps. He still finds those mutable boundaries, but in these Polaroids, gives an even more telling shape to passing time.

Contact the artist at [email protected]. Additional images are here.