What should be of fundamental interest to us, therefore, in regard to representations of people, is the way these representations help to determine subjectivity itself. Representation is a fact of daily experience which concerns us all intimately. We may tend to think that we were each born into the world as a little ‘self’, as well-formed psychologically as physiologically. Psychoanalysis, however, has built up a different picture: we become what we are through our encounter, while growing up, with the myriad representations of what we may become — the various positions that society allocates to us. There is no essential self which precedes the social construction of the self through the agency of representation.
On the surface streets, the monotony of the highway has no home. I walked from predominantly white to African American to Hispanic neighborhoods where the Spanish language was the local currency. West of the Los Angeles River, these tightly packed neighborhoods were a mix of urban and suburban. I passed just north of the intersection at Normandie and Florence, the site of riots in 1992; two decades later, the external wounds were invisible in the neighborhood.
I think that’s partly why architecture is becoming interesting. Because it seems to be a field where form is being taken seriously. It might also be a little bit of an escape route, I admit. It’s more that architecture provides a form of making a show than it does a form for making an artwork.
For the most part, the photographs are staged, often very elaborately (there are occasional candid photographs). This is especially true for the photographs that regularly make it on to the covers of Vanity Fair or Vogue. They are in colour, somewhat desaturated, typically each with a very specific overall tone. They resemble what we have come to expect from Hollywood movies or TV productions, which often use an overall blueish or greenish atmosphere. As a consequence of these colour choices, skin tones are, for the most part, very far from what real skin looks like. The photograph’s heavy artifice is apparent.
Loneliness is as present as faith throughout the book. The loneliness of travel is endemic in photography’s history for those who leave the studio and travel in search of their subjects. Soth experienced it and recognized it in others. Rather than reject or ignore it, he sought it out, transforming it to empathy. It is all too easy to aim a camera, which can be harsh and unforgiving.
