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Matinee: 'The Apparatus'
29 May 2021
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 398th in our series of Saturday matinees today: The Apparatus.
This short one-minute video shows Oliver Chanarin's exhibit The Apparatus in action at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. That may sound odd for a photography exhibit in which the photographs typically just hang on the wall. But in this exhibit, the photographs do not just sit there.
Instead, a robotic apparatus designed after the mechanical arms used to stock shelves at Amazon fulfillment centers hangs and re-hangs photographs on rails along gallery walls. The photos hang on the wall based on how long visitors look at them, similar to how Web page dwell time impacts advertisements on the Internet.
The photos hang on the wall based on how long visitors look at them...
Chanarin described the installation as a reflection on "our everyday experience of images online, in which our attention is claimed as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales."
The project was initially inspired by Sander's Citizens of the Twentieth Century, which captured portraits of Germans between 1920 and 1930. You can revisit two of those in our review of a reprint of that book.
Chanarin's plan was to photograph the English just as Sander had photographed Germans.
But then Covid-19 hit and Chanarin found himself sheltering in place with his wife. Fortunately Sander came to the rescue, with his photograph Painter's Wife (ca. 1926) which featured Helene Abelen as a defiantly androgynous figure.
That image inspired Chanarin to take 200 photographs of his wife Fiona Jan Burgess in their London home, which he printed by hand in the darkroom for the exhibit.
"This has felt like one of the most personal and intimate experiences of my working life and that is a direct product of the lockdown and the political forces, which have shaped our response to the pandemic," he remarked.
The piece has been installed at SFMOMA for its Off the Wall exhibition that runs through Aug. 22.