Bryan Florentin’s photograph Scene in a Library (after Talbot) is on view in Critical Mass at the SP/N Gallery, through November 11, 2017.

Several of your exhibitions are comprised of work in a variety of media that develops different facets of a particular theme, such as Accretion/Churn (“temporary manifestations of materials (gravel, rocks, soil, plastic sheeting, rebar, etc.) within the mostly urban landscape”) or Inscrutable Evidence (“the contradiction between that which is incapable of being investigated, analyzed, or scrutinized and that which tends to prove or disprove something”). First, in practice, how do you go about developing such an exhibition in all its different aspects; and second, is this photograph part of a larger project like that?

Everything builds on what came before it, consciously or not. That’s why it’s usually difficult to find a clear starting point for any given body of work, to whatever degree there’s a distinct separation between one and another. Observations, concepts/ideas, accumulate and evolve over time. Usually. However, about a year ago I suddenly became very conscious of the increasingly dense collection of printed images (rejects, test prints, etc.) and other material objects accumulating in my studio. The storage side of my studio was growing larger and I was cramming stuff into every square inch of space I could find, to the point where there was barely room for another molecule.

The edges of the piled books struck me as a material analogue to layers of geological sediment, but those layers of book pages also functioned as a corollary of something else that accumulates over time and is signified by the presence of books: knowledge, to use a somewhat problematic and imprecise term, and its transmission.

I had already been working on a project in which I piled books on top of each other at the same time that I was photographing piles of construction material and demolition debris in the environment. The edges of the piled books struck me as a material analogue to layers of geological sediment, but those layers of book pages also functioned as a corollary of something else that accumulates over time and is signified by the presence of books: knowledge, to use a somewhat problematic and imprecise term, and its transmission.

Scene in a Library grew out of the piled books projects and in response to the crammed-full shelving in my studio. It’s the first in a series of photographs in which I removed the backside of tightly packed bookshelves to reveal the page edges of books and periodicals. The objects themselves accumulate in libraries, including personal libraries, and suggest culturally “shared” knowledge as well as idiosyncratic individual knowledge.

As I mentioned, I was also working on series of landscape photographs featuring temporary piles of materials, some of which (aggregate, soil, etc.) have been “processed” in some way in order to be useful for building things (roads, foundations, etc.), or else the piles are debris leftover from construction or demolition. Some of the material is dirt dug up from one place and moved to another. Sometimes the material only sits in the landscape as a pile or mound for a relatively short period of time, but in other cases it gets left for years as if forgotten or abandoned. In either case, photographs of the material make these piles seem like permanent features of the landscape; it’s the effect photographs have on their subject, whatever the subject is. Intellectually you may know that something no longer exists, but a photograph of it seems to render it immutable and extant. So in terms of accretion, the material has been transformed into something other than the pile I photographed during the construction process, but the material is still there nonetheless.

Thinking about those other recent exhibitions of yours, and those key concepts of evidence, of flux, of materials, it’s tempting to read this photograph back into those themes. I can think of ways that this photo could pick up different connotations if included in different installations, i.e. the Kuleshov effect. So it seems like you could be working on at least two levels: making individual artworks, and then also thinking about how they fit together in an installation. The possibilities seem endless… What guides you along the path of putting all that together?

The process tends to be organic. It’s probably not the smartest thing to do, but I often photograph and make other work that may not easily function outside of the context of an installation. In other words, I tend to think of most individual pieces as components of an installation, in which the parts add up to a whole, even when those parts may appear on the surface to be stand-alone pieces and sometimes are. That can make it somewhat difficult to split off any given photograph that was originally part of an installation to then get accepted into a group exhibition somewhere, although some of it apparently works well enough to do that. Fortunately, Kirk Hopper and his assistant gallery director, Giovanni Valderas, have been very supportive by allowing or even encouraging me to work in this kind of installation format.

Humans, like a lot of other mobile life forms, seem to spend a lot of time taking bits of the natural environment from one place to another. Humans just do it on a much larger scale.

As you suggest, the installation possibilities are indeed endless as long as I continue to work, whether or not I even “make” anything else. Any artist (or curator for that matter) could select any individual works and treat them as components that can be remixed in endless permutations.

I may be moving a little off topic here, but since you mentioned flux, another aspect of accumulation/accretion is the churn of the environment due to human activity. It’s particularly visible in the demolition and construction that is a constant around here. Humans, like a lot of other mobile life forms, seem to spend a lot of time taking bits of the natural environment from one place to another. Humans just do it on a much larger scale. My own art practice involves moving things from one place to another (e.g., finding objects in random places, taking them to my studio, then to a gallery, then back to my studio), or participating in systems of moving materials and objects (purchasing finished products that are available to me based on international supply chains, or shipping art to and from exhibitions, etc.)

Photo history students will know that William Henry Fox Talbot invented the calotype process, and that beginning in 1844, he published the first book with photographic illustration: The Pencil of Nature. You’re a scholar of the history of photography, so let me ask: out of all the possible moments to go back to, what drew you to Talbot?

I’ve been photographing piles/mounds in the landscape for several years. Because many of the sites are active demolition/construction sites I often find chunks of concrete (from broken up foundations, parking lots, sidewalks, streets, etc.). After collecting various sizes and types of this material, I started storing them on shelves in my studio with the flat side down so that they protrude from the shelves. It reminded me of a Talbot photograph called Articles of China that I show to students in the History of Photography course. The shelf I initially used for the concrete happened to have the same proportions as Talbot’s Scene in a Library, and because I was already piling photo history books on top of each other to create a mound that protrudes above the vitrine they sit in, it was the next logical step to place books and magazines on the shelves I had been using for chunks of concrete. Plus, you know, bookshelves are made for books.

Looking closely at this photograph: All of the volumes on the shelves have their spines facing away, so we can’t read the titles. But based on the thickness and height of the volumes, I’d guess that most of them might be magazines, maybe even photo magazines? Also, they are packed very tightly, so the photograph has a compressed or airless feeling about it. For all these reasons, we could interpret this formally, in terms of flatness, pattern and repetition. However, there are also so many metaphorical meanings of books, reading and libraries, which I won’t even try to list… Am I on the right track with those aspects of the piece?

A lot of artists have used books, mostly with the titles and authors visible. The geological analogy of sedimentary accretion is more evident in page edges than spines and title info would probably be distracting for what I’m doing with this work. However, I’m not really trying to keep the content of the books secret: It’s various aspects of art history, photo history, and art/critical theory; the periodicals are mostly Artforum and Aperture.

Artforum uses a lot of full bleeds, especially for the ads. It’s the bleeds that create the subtle color and tonal differences, which is less common with books. As a technical matter, binding is thicker that the page end, so I discovered that the shelves fill completely on the front (spine) side, leaving the back (page edge) side sparse and saggy. In order to fill out the visible side of the photograph, about every tenth Artforum is cut in half, which produced some very interesting effects on the front and back covers, albeit effects that are nearly invisible in the photograph. If you look closely, you can see some jagged qualities in spots, which is where the text is chopped off mid-letter, in effect bleeding in places it wasn’t intended to.

I’m interested in the nature of photography and perhaps I’m mildly obsessed with the peculiar way that printed photographs exist as material objects. So ontological questions often inform what and how I photograph, and how I use photographs.

I’m interested in the nature of photography and perhaps I’m mildly obsessed with the peculiar way that printed photographs exist as material objects. So ontological questions often inform what and how I photograph, and how I use photographs. In that way it’s an integral part of the work, but the work isn’t usually only about that. And I’m really not engaged in a comprehensive, systematic analysis of the nature and function of photography in the way artists like Christopher Williams have dealt with it in recent years. My approach is to wrap it up into some other aspect of content. For example, Scene in a Library deals with the flatness aspect of a printed photograph in relation to the flatness of the subject, engages with an early photograph made by one of the inventors of photography, and explores what the subject itself (books and magazines on a bookshelf) may suggest.

In terms of flatness, it allows me to work with the mimetic qualities of photographs when the prints are 1:1 scale, which Scene in a Library is. That really only works with 2-dimensional subjects, where the very flatness of the subject is congruent with the image surface. It allows me to make photographs that look like flat things. I’ve also taken relatively flat things and tried to make them look like photographs, at least at first glance, but it’s harder to do than I thought.

To make Binding, for example, I pulled the entire binding (spine and both covers) off of some books and worked hard to make them completely flat, then arranged them into a slightly asymmetrical grid. Even though the work overall is very flat, it never got fully photographically flat. The right half is the inside covers. The other half is the outside. One of the titles, Varieties of Visual Experience, is clearly visible. In an effort to reduce the metallic ink sheen of the other two titles, I painted over the titles with thin black paint, blending it into the blackness of the covers. The titles, A World History of Photography and The History of Modern Art, are barely visible but still there if you look closely. All the covers, inside and out, are white, black, or gray. The gray, it turns out, is middle gray, in photographic terms, which is the 18% reflectance that light meters use as a reference point when calculating exposure. In this case, I didn’t actually make a photograph, I just tried to make it look like I did.