From Jacob Charles Wilson’s review of “Mind the Gap” for Paper Journal:
Joshua Lutz, photographer and educator, evokes the schizophrenic experience in his latest photobook Mind the Gap (Schilt Publishing, 2018). The book is split between mundane images of American suburban life and eclectic, poetic texts; between monochrome and colour; between “two worlds vying for my attention at all times…”, as Lutz writes in the introduction. “In one of them” he continues, “this diagnosis has metastasized to the brain and I am no longer able to care for my children … In the other world, noise shuts down for a split second and the smallest fragment of light becomes a pathway to immortality.”
Already, there’s a sense that any stable foundation of truth will be impossible to find. The narrator of these images is unreliable and liable to change their mind, or perhaps the result of multiple minds, and anyway, a photograph cannot prove anything at all, it can only have truth applied to it in a rather haphazard fashion, opening itself up to multiple contradictory truths. Yet it is precisely this rootlessness, this instability of meaning, that Deleuze and Guattari value. Their process of ‘schizoanalysis’, intended to replace the scientific reason of psychoanalysis, does not seek to explain images with reductive statements, but to “work towards its complexification, its processual enrichment”. With this in mind, it’s worth thinking of gaps not as absences that lack meaning, but as points of potential development.
Browse Joshua Lutz’s series “Mind the Gap” at ClampArt
Browse all of Joshua Lutz’s work at ClampArt