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A few different potential write-ups have been put together for this project.
The first is from my friend Patrick Zapien, who wrote this for a show I had at Filter in 2025, however they opted to not have any text for the show. That said, this text addresses this work and it would be nice to see it used for this project.
It was Baudelaire’s fear—not quite misplaced—that the acceptance of photography as an art would eventually dull the public’s faculties of feeling and judgment, and hence lead to the decline of art as a whole. He imagined that in presenting the relationship between image and reality as one of exact, near-immediate replication, photography not only reduced nature to what can be seen through the eye of a lens but threatened to make both artists and the public forget the “ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation.” And it can hardly be denied that photography’s effect on the general intellect has largely been numbing, constraining the imagination to what can be verified by sense data perception—which is not to discredit the efforts of those photographer-artists who have managed to transform the technology into a medium of art by discovering its formal language, figuring out which aspects of the photos they take can act as conduits for viewers’ memory without them knowing the specific people and places depicted. The photographic image has the power to render everything general: the colors, shapes, figures, settings, and situations, whether real or manufactured, can be seen for what they are in their aesthetic dimension, contained within a frame that forms a world of its own, analogous to ours but distinct in the obscure symbolic meaning that veils every object in an otherworldly light. Nearly a century after Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin credited photography with penetrating into the optical unconscious, uncovering the hidden form of gestures and movements arrested at a fraction of a second, caught between moments of conscious control. Photography’s peculiar ability to induce memory is perhaps due to a resemblance between this optical unconscious and the mental images we use to visualize the world internally. Indeed, in our hyper photographic age it’s likely that the boundary between the two no longer exists, that our memory of events has become inseparable from the photographic media that we use to record them. And so it turns out that photography, despite Baudelaire’s rebukes and admonitions, does have some claim to the “ethereal and immaterial,” for better or worse.
This mnemonic aspect of photography, which is inseparable from its aesthetic form of expression, is what gives the photos of Clay Mills their uncanny effect, their feeling of déjà vu. For those who grew up in the suburbs of middle America between the late 90s and mid 00s, Mills' photos have an undeniable nostalgic charm. These images of nowhere and anyplace, populated by half-familiar figures, capture the liminal quality of the kinds of spaces that form the backdrop of most people’s lives in America. Mills understands that the apparently banal, almost featureless architecture of suburbia is at the same time a landscape of love and desire, an object of yearning and scorn for those who inhabit it. Formally, this translates to a heavy use of on-camera flash that tends to desaturate and flatten the image, a large depth of field that renders nearly everything in focus, and a way of composing that feels immediate and spontaneous, probably much more so than in actual fact since a lot of what makes these photos so great is how clearly they direct the eye of the viewer around the image, drawing it first to a central subject, usually placed in the midground and brightly lit, from which a network of vertical and diagonal lines then move out towards the edges of the frame and back, such that the subject seems to exercise a magnetic pull on the viewer’s attention. The photos are stark and direct in their presentation. Superficially, they look like snapshots, but there’s something strange and foreboding within them that can’t quite be explained by the things they depict. The unnerving quality the photos possess is rather an effect of their evocative power. By imitating the style of untrained, amateur photography and turning it into a consistent formal language, Mills is able to produce images that serve almost as substitute memories for the viewer, conjuring up a non-existent past into being. They beg the unsettling question: Why have I lived my life as I have?
Here’s a shorter one I wrote:
Life has become poison. The photographer is a Mithridatist.
The world is aesthetically offensive. Most artists turn away from it. But one still feels it by its absence. Art’s “beauty” accents the world’s “ugliness.”
But what if the opposite is true? What if, by some margin, it’s art and ourselves who have become ugly, and the world is what’s beautiful — just not for us. What if beyond the exurban mess, a secret order lies hidden?
The photographer’s impulse to show someone something has a sadistic quality about it. “If I had to see it, so do you.” But this impulse also has an organizational principle. It wants to give form to the experience which found the original sight so ugly, but by doing so it transforms it into something else entirely.
We might be allergic to the world, but the small doses of antidote that the photographer produces with each image slowly immunizes us with distance. This is the task of the photographer. To give the viewer enough space to ask themselves, why do I live like this? Why has life itself become poisonous?
Here’s a longer one that I wrote
My camera looks for the too-familiar in America. That which one sees everyday but has become un-aestheticized through its omnipresence. The modus operandi of most contemporary photography is to avoid the too-familiar. I seek to make it the sole focus of my photography. If no one wants to look at it, maybe that means there’s actually something there.
In the 19th century the center of the new was the great cities industrialization fostered. Walter Benjamin called Paris the capital of the 19th century. No such place exists today, despite competing claims from various metropolitan centers around the world. Instead, the new must be sought elsewhere. It has been dispersed along with people, who were spread throughout suburbs and slums in the 20th century, suburbs and slums which have now become strange blossoms of exurban sprawl. What has remained true is that the new desires empty space, whether naturally empty or made empty by destructive forces. The newly new is destined to become the has-been, the ever same. And this is our relationship with the world now, a new world which now appears to us all too stale, even if it is in fact, really new.
We live in an America that has been primarily exurban for a while now. What’s new is everyone we know has grown up in that environment, meaning it’s taken for granted. What does it mean to turn our ever-present image of life back onto ourselves? To make the too-familiar unfamiliar by photographing it earnestly? To ask, why does our life look like this? This is what I task myself with as a photographer.