Christopher Williams: Open Letter to Model No. 1740

Dear Model No. 1740,

How is it that we turn to the studio now? A time to carry out an inventory, an assessment of the tools, the materials, the conditions and the contexts of our activity? Construct a place for images we do not yet know how to produce? Images in motion, between archetypes (the family, the couple, the child) that need refunctioning, and unrealizable prototypes? What’s wrong with re-distribution?

As if I told you

The adoption of the open letter? This letter, addressed to one but distributed to a wider audience, this letter, made up of all that exists between the ceiling and the floor, between the window and the wall. (1)

As if I told you

Not an exhibition of photographs, rather the occupation of redundant models, moving like a solvent between layers, separating the elements, a programmed freedom.

As if I told you

To focus is to assert a preference for one surface over another. For every fragment of the world, a fragment of the camera. A model is a representation of a system.

As if I told you

She is German. She is white. She is a professional within the field of image production. She is an instrument, a medium, a figure in an equation. She is paid to produce the signs of innocence and happiness. She is a worker in a network of economies beyond her comprehension. She is an air hostess for Lufthansa. She is the Playmate of the Year. She is a worker in the domestic industry. She is the producer of family well-being. She is the provider of a good atmosphere. She creates the conditions of emotional richness. She decorates the house, prepares the meals, she produces new producers. She is a worker in the service of the smile. She is
a model. She hits her marks on cue. She is four years old. Her future will unfold within a rich warm palette of Eastern desert browns, ochres, and yellows, with textures and accents provided by the dark greys and blacks of Brussels and Paris.

As if I told you
A standard image, a normative image, a conventional image, a redundant image.

As if I told you
The staging of images from everyday life, walls, cameras, children, living-room carpets, tires, and bookstore windows, all reduced to a schematic diagram. (2)

As if I told you
To focus is to assert a preference for one surface over another. For every fragment of the world, a fragment of the camera. A model is a representation of a system.

As if I told you

Beauty and happiness at ground level. If you have never walked barefoot in this house, in this house where detail is understood, in this house where violence is allowed, in this house where emotion is forbidden, in this house where everything is for sale, in this house where perception of the whole would hinder our productivity, in this beautiful network of communication that enables thought to have a social body, to break the solitude.

Is this so private, our struggle to communicate? Is this really the way it is? Or a contract in our mutual interest? I am in paradise, paradise is unbearable.

Christopher Williams

1.   Open Letter: 1/ seven photographs, 2/ four walls, 3/ two posters, 4/ two collages, 5/ one publication, 6/ archival materials

2.   The history of photography as art in the in 20th century is the history of the illustrated press or the photo book, and no one stands as a clearer example of this than Walker Evans, who embraced the roles of photographer, editor, graphic designer, typographer, and copy writer. In his books, but especially his magazine work, no one element took dominance over the others. In fact, he used each element as a device to open up rather than reduce the possibilities of the entire network. Evans possessed an acute sense of context and many times used his position within a publication to criticize the ideology of its support structure. Making the jump to the context of exhibition and gallery display, it’s of course easy to think of the photographic practitioner extending their role to that of the curator, exhibition designer, etc. Two things should be noted: Evans was criticized for the physical distance between his photographs and his texts, and it is well known that he locked himself in the Museum of Modern Art to arrange his own pictures, sometimes wheat pasting them to the walls so that they could not be moved.

3.   Program: Views according to which this device and the various theories framing it will function for the artistic production the same way as the artistic production itself functions as advertising for the order under which it is produced. There will be no other space than this view according to which… etc. Cartridge replacement, release, release, release, release, release, release, release, release, release, reread this program again and again, become its author, correct it and repeat it, distribute it, and when we are all its authors, the old world will crumble and make way for… release, release, 69, 70, 71, 72 …