Hokkaido

Had Caspar David Friedrich been wandering around Japan in the late twentieth century armed with a camera and Xerox machine, his Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and other visual essays into the pictorial sublime might have come out something like this. The romantic aspect of man's exclusion from nature is here written into the single lapidary wave whose marbled crest breaks on an outcrop of rock just the other side of our man-made limits. Growing up on storm-torn remote islands, it's an image I've seen and heard thousands of times, but whose undertow still pulls me in. Only the railing holds us back from its seething, roiling energy, from the suicidal beauty that is the urge to submit to such pounding violence.



Charger

They were blunt instruments, Detroit's triumph of force over finesse. Restyled in 1971, the Charger made iconic in Bullitt, was smoothed out as the buttress rear window, aircraft style filler-cap, door and window trim gave way to the Coke bottle lines with their implication of motion at rest. For purists, the '69 and '70 are the only ones to have. Stylistically, the lineage of those cars is still firmly rooted in the sixties, in an era prior to the emasculations of OPEC, emission controls and the eventual dissolution of the long marriage of power, fossil fuels and other freedoms. But it's the cars from the early seventies that best reflect the brute force of an industry that had become detached from corners and wedded to the belief that the road ahead would be both wide and straight. The image itself has none of the fetishized gleam of a hot-rodder's obsession with finish. Instead, it deadpans on the anonymous photography of insurance assessors and Want Ad Digests. The captions to these photographs read as the encrypted accounts of gear head dreams held together by Bondo and bolt-on parts. The language is without syntax but legible to every backwater American who grew up with a pair of axle stands and a Summit Racing catalogue. '71 Charger, 440 stroked and bored, JE pistons, Indy cylinder heads matched and ported, 750 double pumper, 3500 stall mated to a Cheetah reverse valve body running through a Dana 60. Low 12's might be typical for a good worked one. Unfinished projects tell another story—often of bleeding knuckles and mismatched parts. Either way, the black and white photographs that appear with them are portraits of democratized possibility. Monuments to an era of fossil geology, their hard shells and combusting hearts appear now like dinosaurs, creatures that once roamed freely in the prehistory of our dreams.



Milan

That the woman in the image was not known to the photographer, or for that matter, those who subsequently seek meaning from the silhouette amongst the shadows, may be of no consequence. We see her, a silent figure, walking towards what is, to us, an unknown destination. Whether guided by the geometry of life, light, manifest destiny or simply the utilitarian grid of an existence ordered according to the ideals of others can never be known. But regardless of that we have nonetheless become accustomed to recognizing ourselves in the regimens of modernists whose social planning is written in the grout and tiles of walkways that connect the precincts of our endeavors at home, at work, in the car, in love. It's her, and others like her, who turn geometry into dwelling and who adorn the architecture of others' ideals with the necklace of human emotion. Conditioned by the extremes of photographic stillness, it speaks to the traditions of Dutch quietude familiar to Marcopoulos from the works of Pieter Jansz. Saenredam (1597-1665) and others for whom the architecture of serenity is the self-made nature morte against which all cerebral life is measured. And in many ways the sole occupant of this intellectual space also conforms to that same tradition. Only here, the hint of carnality that disturbs the silence with the clack of heels and fabric against loosely swung hips reminds us that even the coolest of visions harbor the promise of a hot and unaccount- able presence breaking through the orthogonals of our sobriety....



Alice Temple

According to maritime lore, tattoos of the Virgin Mary literally covered sailors' backs. Not only did they shield against misfortune, but they provided protection from the punishment of misdeeds since few in a world compassed by religious superstition would willingly flog a likeness of the Virgin, albeit one that was imprinted on the miscreant's back. Protection from flogging was, I doubt, what Alice Temple had in mind when she decided to ink her back with an image of irrefutable vanitas. In painting, that genre is best known through the Dutch masterpieces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for which the skulls, rooting fruit, mirrors and so forth, symbolize the brevity of all earthly achievement and pleasure even as it exhorts the viewer in their consideration of mortality to repent carnal misconduct and prepare for spiritual reckoning. But significantly the genre evolved from the skulls and other symbols of death that would be hidden on the reverse side of much of late Renaissance portraiture. Taken from behind, Marcopolous' portrait of Temple evokes all of these deaths and reversals. And, if as Freud would have it, all orgasm is a form of 'petite mort,' it's hard not to imagine such an experience staring death in the eye.



Dictation

If ever the writing was on the wall that we have irrevocably entered new periods of communication, it's now. Except here, the writing's on the floor, and the writing, far from being the exegetical text of page or wall, is graf- fiti, the now global urban vernacular that mates disembodied speech with disenfranchised architecture. For those of us who grew up in a brave new world of word processors and answering machines, for whom the future still carried the promise of space travel and expanded universes, for whom the revolution would not be telephoned or privatized, the cell phone changed society and the very social rules by which it is shaped. Shouting to yourself on a crowded sidewalk, once the exclusive province of the deranged—or those who, like myself, wanted to appear deranged in order to withhold the scrutiny of others—is now the norm. Sitting in a puddle of broken script, the solitary figure in the photograph speaks above the defunct language to a private universe where connections are made via space and satellites beam conversations between solitary monads.



Cairo, Sonoma, 2006

On seeing this image, Barry McGee said that Marcopoulos captured an entire era and that he could now stop taking photos. Even though McGee was right, it hasn't stopped Marcopoulos. The lanky teenagers that are his sons and the sons of others still appear in the liminal portraiture of a generation who seem to look upon their own image with an indifference available only to the self-possessed.



7-30-07

We've all taken them and most are not very good. The wonder that was once the accompaniment to such elevated vision has now been reduced to the standard fare, chicken or beef. And yet, perhaps more than landscape, cloudscapes capture some of the essence of photography. The images that we see made out of moisture and atmosphere, like those made out of chemicals and paper or photons captured on a digital back are, by nature, evanescent and fleeting. Now in his eighties, my father has limited his photographic activity to just clouds. Trained as a pilot, his interest in meteorology was focused on the very specific characteristics of wind and temperature shear that affec- ted safety in a small single-engine fighter plane. His interest is now divorced from physical effect and I believe he looks at them in the same way as Marcopoulos, with the wonder of someone who is aware of the magnificence of great, invisible and abstract forces given momentary form.



Houston

It's hard to figure out what this picture is about. The dull empirical gray of the horizon broken only by distant jagged geometry reminded me of images of wartime convoys seen through the periscope of a U-boat as they struggled supplies through the unyielding waters of the Scapa Flow. In fact, it's the city of Houston seen from a distance, but the thought is still there. I think it was JG Ballard who, in understanding the urban near future as the obsolete in reverse, coined the expression 'skyline encephalograph.' In this vision, the intricacies of all human endeavors—of putting out the garbage, of nameless derelictions of personal conscience, dubious sexual conducts, inexplicable bereavements, jackknifed relationships and other proteins of normalcy and fear—find themselves reduced to a flat silhouette of distant possibility. It speaks to the possibility, perhaps, that no city can be lived in at a distance....



Boys on pods

The river of silence that runs through all photography is ever evident. Deep and dark, it is aerated by the oxygen of the pop, the sound streams that connect the silent majorities to the voices of their twilight idols to the ferment of their angers and dreams. The activity is common to all, a shared private language in which broadcast has become podcast and listening, a solitary activity designed to shut out politics and parents, holds the world at bay. Absorbed in their private rituals, the two boys' gently bowed heads suggest the deference and respect deserved of modern religion. They are shown quiet and immaculate, lost in invisible worlds of metal and rap, friction and lullaby. Still pictures, after all, run deep.



Scar

The scars we carry within may be the more deadly, but it is those on our bodies by which we are known. As people, we are marked in every way. Most are recessed behind the visible frontier of the flesh. Those that are not, whether concealed or revealed with pride or shame, are the irrevocable impress of history on the flesh, the physi- cal expression of memory and mythic realization of our unrevealed pasts. For Odysseus, it was the mark on his leg from boar hunting on Mount Parnassus that lead his old wet nurse, Eurycleia, to recognize him from within the ravages of adventure and war. For Harry Potter, it's the influence of his nemesis Voldemort that is registered through the mortality of recently healed flesh. For an anonymous skater, that wound is trophy to a past only he can truly know.



'Home is the most important place in the world'

Romantic disillusion may be a feature of urban landscape as much as the seascapes, mountain views and other images of natural grandeur that draw attention only to man's desolation. Looking less like an Ivy League seat of learning and more the concrete mausoleum of Eastern Bloc social housing, you can almost smell the urine in the elevators of Marcel Breuer's monument to modernism. Itself designed as a giant billboard for the modernist dream of better living through design, it now bears the indignity of palimpsest, as if those failed dreams have been superseded by others whose blue and yellow colors signal the end of the international movement and the beginning of corporate nationalism. It's depressing to see the grand ambition of design reduced to storage solution. If, as the slogan suggests, 'Home is the most important place in the world,' then why would millions of people spend weekends dragging flat-pack crap back from the suburbs of nameless super malls so that the limited identities we still posses can be tucked away in laminated chipboard drawers whose handles and pulls bear names that speak the language of national disdain? As with our heads, so we furnish our homes. In the vicinity of airports and other spaces recognizable for the failed prevalence of history we buy into flat-pack socialism turned to a profit—sensible Scandinavian furniture that measures in the metric system and suggests the region's famously long winters and suicide rate. Breuer, it seemed, died a long time ago.



My little friend

'Guns don't kill people. Rappers do.' So read the bumper sticker slapped on the rear end of the car I was tailgating somewhere in the Charlton Heston provinces of greater L.A. It was around the time that Gus van Sant's Elephant had come out, that the Columbine massacre was fresh in everyone's memory and the adolescent fetishization of the phallic body hammer had somehow leached from the gangland beefs and back room deals of Murder Inc. and into the high schools and classrooms of those whose curriculum was driven less by biblical reckonings than with the retributive justice that is revenge. And so the image of a lovingly crafted assault rifle stirs the ambivalence of all forms of recorded and fetishized violence—not just those of liminal rage and vindication, of friendly fire and collateral damage, but also something of perhaps greater stealth but no less brutality; that Susan Sontag identified when she described the act of photography itself as a 'soft, sublimated form of murder.'



Fear God

A Xerox of a photograph of a drawing taken from the artwork of a CD by rapper Lil' Wayne, whose beats are samples of other recordings, may seem like a creation at so many removes from anything like a reality that is unique, original or capable of laying claim to our attention that it would barely register on the scales of things to be noticed. Yet the fact that Marcopoulos has chosen to privilege such a refracted and regressed index of who we are may speak those everyday acts of strange reversal. Whereby the same acts of replication, copying and viral mutation that have allowed rap to spread outwards from the urban ghetto and into the suburbs of global culture are also capable of reinvesting individual significance in the dilutions of mass media. Fear God, indeed.





Download Portable Document Format (PDF)