Twentysix Gasoline Stations - M. Earl Williams
M. Earl Williams’Twentysix Gasoline Stations would be curious enough were it simply a series of screenshots of gas stations from Los Santos, Grand Theft Auto V’s ghostly clone of the mythically-mutable Los Angeles. But the definitions of “real” and “fake”, “valuable” and “commonplace” just keep getting more fractured the more you look at the book. Fans of art history will recognize the title, subject, and even layout of Williams’ book as mimicking Ed Ruscha’s 1963 infamous conceptual photography series of the [almost] same name and [almost] the same place. Both Twentysix Gasoline Stations push back against extravagant technique and serious subjects of “Fine Art Photography”, showing how the banal and quotidian often are fascinating and rich. One difference between the original and Williams’ update is that at full size, many of Williams’ images exhibit artifacts and glitching as the result of using an analog camera to take pictures of a high definition LCD screen. Looking more closely, the type and resolution of these “flaws” indicate that the photographs were made by a large format/view camera, the very cameras used by the photographers that Ruscha’s original book was subverting. In this way, Williams’ images return full circle to embrace the mischievous intellectual spirit of Ruscha, with the massive resolution and analog fussiness of the large format camera leveraged to let us see anew our relationship with virtual places, but also with the bewildering surfaces and technological behaviors of the so-common-as-to-be-unnoticeable LCD flatscreen that defines the HD era.
Artist: M. Earl Williams
Link: https://www.mearlwilliams.com/gasoline_stations
Book: https://www.blurb.com/b/5454103-twentysix-gasoline-stations
Connections:
Ed Ruscha - Twentysix Gasoline Stations
Thom Andersen - Los Angeles Plays Itself