From Joerg Colberg’s review on Conscientious:
Photographs, we believe, show things that exist. They show people and their expressions of mental states (which are very different from those states themselves). But this ability to show some things, this inability to show other things, is the medium’s greatest strength. Photography is unthinkable without uncertainty. Photographs show much less than what we want them to show. That’s why we give them captions, that’s why we place them next to each other: photographs usually don’t show what we want them to show.
Lutz makes use of this simple fact by embracing, instead of rejecting or fighting against, photographic ambiguity. Combining archival photographs along with his own, “Hesitating Beauty” describes a world that language cannot adequately talk about, a world that our (sane) brains cannot comprehend. There is the surface of that world, that, which we can see (a hand holding onto a hospital gurney, say), and there is the transformed surface, the photograph from a family album, which has long ceased to be just that, to, instead, become a collection of feelings and associations more than the literal object, the photograph.
View Joshua Lutz’s series, “Hesitating Beauty”
Browse all of Joshua Lutz’s work at ClampArt