Galerie Dennis Cooper presents … Amir Zaki

 

‘In photographer Amir Zaki’s vertiginous, depopulated views, usually long exposures shot at night, velvety dark blue-greens dominate, illuminated by eerie halos of electric light. Rooflines, cornices, garden walls, empty backyards with potted plants and outdoor furniture outline LA residences and the landscapes surrounding or intruding on them. It’s as if Julius Shulman abandoned black-and-white to do location stills for The X-Files.

‘In his new photographs, Zaki negotiates the chill, even noir aspects of Los Angeleno domesticity. I write “negotiates” (rather than, say, “interrogates”) because it’s difficult to discern what kind of meaning Zaki thinks his work is producing. Three photographs here were slashed, as were their mounting and framing, and whole sections removed (a horizontal or vertical “middle,” a corner that perhaps followed a roof slope). Zaki’s decision to crowd the three “cut” works chockablock with ten others in which the physicality of the photograph and its support is not an issue has disturbing and, I would guess, unintended—consequences. The excisions do not cam the weight of sculptural concerns; these aren’t Gordon Matta-Clark cut pieces done with photographs. If they are corrections of some kind, why would Zaki produce an edition of eight and cut each apart in exactly the same manner—and what is the relation of the “corrected” pieces to the unedited images? It would have been preferable to see fewer pieces with a stronger focus on what motivates this project, on whether and how the approaches produce different kinds of meaning.

‘Zaki has never denied digitally manipulating his photographs. It’s tempting to read his cutting away the print and its support as a return of the repressed real, an insistence on a physicality his medium may not really have. Photographs—shadow and light, eminently reproducible—are simultaneously objects and specters; digitization further complicates the photograph’s already complicated thingness. But rather than emphasize the images’ physicality, Zaki’s cutting seems to trash not only those cleft but, paradoxically, all the photographs, any potential importance of the meaning, along with much of his larger enterprise.

‘Zaki also showed a DVD piece, This Video Was Not Supposed to Exist. It Replaces Another One That Committed Suicide (all works 2001): Huddled near a backyard swimming-pool shed are two preteen girls and a boy of about six, the age Zaki was (an artist’s statement tells us) when Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, hung himself. Copyright law forbade the exhibition of a video in which the kids recite a whole album of Joy Division lyrics (Zaki read the words aloud, the kids repeated them, and then the artist digitally removed his voice and the pauses). In the video that is shown, the kids instead explain why they’re not reciting Joy Division lyrics. While not entirely successful on its own, when combined with the photographs the digital video suggests that Zaki’s interests may not best be served by photography, or by an adherence to any one medium at all. A number of factors—that he offers a video that’s a stand-in for another; that he mutilates his photographs; that in the statement accompanying the show he emphasizes Curtis’s suicide and wonders whether the kids’ recitation of the lyrics’ “angst and depression” would be different if they were older—lead me to think that rather than domestic architecture per se, Zaki is interested in the architectonics of sorrow. He is attempting something much more considerable than the “ominous” nightscaping of Todd Hido or Miranda Lichtenstein. His concerns seem to exceed photography, to require additional concepts and media to witness the relations between locale and psychic climates, between palm trees and sunshine and suicide.’ — Bruce Hainley

 

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Further

Amir Zaki Website
AZ @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Book: ‘Building + Becoming’
Amir Zaki @ instagram
Interview w/ AZ
A CASE FOR PRETENDING: WHY IDENTITY IS A SHAM AND AUTHENTICITY AN ILLUSION
Book: ‘California Concrete: A Landscape Of Skateparks by Amir Zaki’
Podcast: On perception and artist Amir Zaki
Amir Zaki by Christopher Michno
The Light Thief: A Self-Aware Modernist
Podcast: Philosophy of Photography w/ Amir Zaki
Amir Zaki’s rhetoric of authenticity disrupts …
You don’t need rules to look at Amir Zaki’s photography

 

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Extras

Empty Vessel, the photography of Amir Zaki

Amir Zaki: On Being Here

Artist Lecture Series: Amir Zaki

AMIR ZAKI AT DIANE ROSENSTEIN GALLERY

 

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Interview
from Yield Magazine

 

Mike Rippy: Can you describe how you became interested in photography?

Amir Zaki: Sure. Let’s see. I grew up in a pretty small town in Southern California. My dad was from Egypt, my mom’s from Minnesota. They both moved to California from Minnesota after my dad emigrated from Egypt. We lived in a small town. My dad was a scientist, my mom’s a home economics teacher and nobody was an artist. That’s my long way to get to the part that nobody made art in my family.

We were fairly isolated from any extended family, and I basically, I’m 47 now, so I was a punk/goth kid in that era. Friends were “alternative”, which was the word we were using at the time. And basically in high school, I got a camera and was making these moody black and white pictures of friends smoking cigarettes and our weird haircuts.

MR: Sounds familiar.

AZ: That’s what I was interested in, that’s the subculture that I came from. Then, I got into university at UC Riverside. I was straight up from high school. I was young – I was just barely turning 18. I was a psychology major and then within a year changed to philosophy, and that’s an important move because my interest in philosophy stays to this day.

I’m really interested in both Eastern, Western – anything I get my mind on. But after about a year of philosophy, in that period of time, I met, who’s now my wife, but was my girlfriend at the time. She was interested in art, and philosophy started getting really dry for me. It was like I was just realizing that there were going to be some really difficult, boring classes, not all the fun, existential stuff I was interested in. In all of that, I landed in a photography class, encouraged by my girlfriend – wife now – and landed in a photo class, and it was taught by John Divola.

That was an important moment because a lot of time those beginning level classes are taught by a visiting lecturer, which could be great too. But I just happened to be very lucky that quarter. I had no idea who he was at the time, didn’t know anything about photography, but I had a little background in what I was doing, just being an interested kid.

All these things came together – philosophy, an introduction to a beginning art class taught by someone who’s a very, very gifted teacher and already an interesting artist. He just opened things up. It was really like, “Oh my God, I can express all these philosophical ideas, but visually.” Being from that generation – I’ve been thinking about this a lot with this whole NFT thing and these generational differences – is that, so ingrained in people from that era was this questioning authority, not conforming, and that’s what this felt like.

It was a realization that, “Oh, there isn’t a right answer. You’re not telling me go make these pictures. You’re saying here’s an idea. Go out in the world and use what you have.” It was fucking amazing. It was exactly what I needed. It was just luck. And so then I just started taking photo classes.

I’m a little bit of a gearhead. Some science interest, math interest, made photography very accessible. And what made it even better is that I became an art major. I realized I couldn’t draw. I never wanted to draw. I found it super intimidating. My girlfriend was great at drawing and painting. I hated it, and I realized I didn’t have to do it. That wasn’t what art had to be. I could be an artist and not know how to draw, and all that just seemed great. That was the beginning, and then grad school and all the other fun stuff, but that’s the genesis of where it came from.

MR: I didn’t know Uta Barth was also a mentor of yours, I guess you could say a teacher. I want to get back to that, but I also want to get back to the idea that your dad comes from a different cultural perspective. That’s really interesting, and I want to know how his cultural views of America have impacted you because you said that you butted heads a lot. How do you appreciate his viewpoints and how they impact and influence what you’re doing now?

AZ: Just to give a little bit of background about that. Okay, so my dad coming from Egypt was Muslim, and my mom was Catholic. We grew up with zero dogma. We didn’t grow up “religious”, but both my parents were religious. My dad was an incredibly independent thinker. He’s the only person in his family who left the country at 20 and moved across the world. He had to buck up and figure out how to survive in a very difficult situation alone and stuff. He was a tough dude, and he was also just very independent, even from his family. He didn’t take bullshit, he didn’t like religious dogma.

All that stuff is really important. A lot of his values are things that I shared. He just liked to engage. We’ve engaging in difficult conversations from the time that I was very young. Probably as soon as I could – like, 10, 12, or something. He always opened it like it was an open invitation to have a conversation. There were very little topics considered to be “off the table”. In fact, that’s also another weird thing about today, that so many things are getting added to the list of being “off the table” to talk about. That also really rubs me the wrong way.

My mom was the first of her family to go to a four year college too. They both came from really modest backgrounds. Those values were very important to me. I will say that something I’ve talked about a lot is the idea of feeling alienated. It’s not something I thought about consciously at the time, but as I get older, I see that my attitude toward photography, all of it is a hybrid, non-purest thing: analog sure, digital sure, black and white, color.

That’s who I am. I don’t come from any very homogenous cultural background, it’s very mixed. I surf. I grew up in Southern California. I’m half Egyptian. My mom is from the Midwest. My family from the Midwest, we look almost nothing alike but we love each other. There’s just all this kind of hybrid attitude is who I am. It translates to my photography and into my attitude about a lot of things. That just has to do with my folks.

MR: How did the skate park photography start? You said you were a surfer. I’m assuming you probably did some skateboarding too. I’ve seen some fantastic skater photography. Some of it is just like surf photography, the way it’s done. How did you pull yourself back and say, “No, this space on its own is worth documenting.” After I started looking at your work, I noticed that I have seen it in the past, like the lifeguard towers and things like that.

AZ: That was a really interesting period of time because I tapped into a bit of pop culture that I don’t normally tap into. But I got interested in conversations with the history of skate photography. That’s an interesting side note, but it was a bit of a perfect storm, so yes, you’re right. I grew up skateboarding – like ramps, backyard ramps. I lived in a very, almost rural place. We didn’t have access to anything like those concrete parks. There was one place that was about a 45-minute drive where all the tough older kids went to. I never went, it was just too scary.

When I turned about 30 – I went all through my 20s without skateboarding at all, just doing other things. Around 30 – I had a toddler at that time, and probably one of my many midlife crises – I lived in a place where there was this small skate park about 15 minutes away. And I just started skating again. By myself, I would go midday when it wasn’t crowded and just try to feel it out and learn how to skate these concrete parks. I just did that for a couple of years. Then falling gets really – I fell on my tailbone a couple of times. It’s like as soon as you start falling, at that age, it gets scary. On and off, skated some of those places with some friends my age for several years, from 30 to 40 probably. I think around 2015, I had the idea, the initial idea. I thought, “Oh, that’s pretty interesting.”

I think I went to one of the skate parks and tried to photograph and just realized all the obstacles. Kids are there all the time, fences, and I gave up very quickly. I just thought it didn’t work. I took a couple of snapshots, “That’s not going to work.” Put it on the back burner, and then around 2018, I don’t know how the idea came again, but I started scouting the local skateparks. “Let me try on my way to Riverside go to this park at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning. That’s what I did, and it was fantastic.

I was the only person there. I walked into this place completely unmanned. I saw security cameras, and it was dawn, my perfect – I love photographing at dawn. I’m by myself, and I’m basically – it felt like I was hiking in a remote spot. I’m walking through the thing, I understand how they work and just started photographing and really looking at it like landscape. It just became so obvious that all the forms were taken from classical landscape, mountains, valleys.

What I realized, the potential was that I could access these things for a good hour or two when the light was unbelievable – and nobody was there because skaters don’t get up early for the most part. That set me off. I started scouting on Google and looking at as many that I could possibly find, running into problems with ones that weren’t accessible and things like that. I started writing to the people who ran them and said, “Hey, could I pay $40 to show up at five in the morning and have you let me in?”

All that stuff pieced it together. That was for about an 18-month period, or two years, focused on California. It was a bit daunting, but I realized that being inside of them was key. I know what you’re talking about when you say, “Yes, it seems obvious in a way.” But what is not obvious is that most people either just don’t see these things up close at all, because there are excavations into the ground that from a street level you miss completely, or if they’re a parent, they see them from that fence, they see them from an outsider’s perspective. Having experience in the spaces when I was younger, it was very natural for me to crawl inside, and to look at them as someone who skates would look at them. It’s actually funny, because when I had to interview Tony Hawk for this thing, it’s like skaters don’t think about them as sculptural forms or as photographic things at all. They’re just looking at a line to skate.

I see that, but I also have a photo background. Again, this hybrid thing, my personality led me into those spaces in an organic way. There’s nothing forced about it. I also felt like at a certain point, while I was doing it, I realized that the whole activity is something that I won’t be able to do forever, like crawling in and out of those things for another 10 years. I don’t think so. I’ll be too old to do it physically.

 

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Videos

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7

5

1

 

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Photographs

BUILT IN 1920. DAMAGED IN 1940. RENOVATED IN 1928, 1992 X, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1927. RENOVATED IN 1936, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1904. DAMAGED IN 1913 X, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1872. DAMAGED IN 1887 OR 1888, 1889, 1914, 1926, 1934, 1947, 1950, 1977, 1978, 1983, 1986, 1994, 1995. RENOVATED IN 2000, 2021

 

BUILT IN 1905. DAMAGED IN 1943, 1993, 1995. RENOVATED IN 2008, 2021

 

THE BEAUTICIAN, 2023

 

THE CELEBRITY, 2023

 

THE CHEF, 2023

 

THE COLLECTOR, 2023

 

THE DESIGNER, 2023

 

THE GURU, 2023

 

THE HOMEOPATH, 2023

 

THE MONK, 2023

 

THE MUSICIAN, 2023

 

THE NURSE, 2023

 

THE PAINTER, 2023

 

THE PASTOR, 2023

 

THE PHOTOGRAPHER, 2023

 

THE SCIENTIST, 2023

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 47, 2019

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 55, 2018

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 38, 2019

 

CONCRETE VESSEL 16, 2019

 

STRANGERS, 2017

 

ROCK #6, 2016

 

ROCK #29, 2016

 

SILVER 7, 2014

 

SILVER 1, 2014

 

TILTED AIRSTREAM, 2014

 

TREE PORTRAIT #21, 2012

 

TREE PORTRAIT #17, 2012

 

TREE PORTRAIT #8, 2012

 

TREE PORTRAIT #28, 2012

 

TOWER 38, 2009

 

TOWER 46, 2009

 

VANAGONS AT DUSK AND DAWN, DAWN AND DUSK, 2009

 

ARTWORK #1, 2007

 

UNTITLED (OH 04), 2004

 

UNTITLED (OH-19), 2004

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Anon, Hey. Okay, I’ll try those albums. So many people are so high on ‘Kid A’. A high probability I missed something my first go round. Exactly: confidence and being ready to articulate why your work needs to work in the way it does is pretty imperative. Very good plan. All the luck, and I’d be happy to hear how the work is going whenever. Love back to you! ** Misanthrope, He never rescued me unless there was some danger he rescued me from what I didn’t know about. Okay, well, glad you enjoyed the ‘Dune’ thing and his part in it. I’ll see it on a plane flight someday. Nothing like seeing intended mindblow spectaculars on a mini-screen with shitty headphones. It really sobers them up. Right, Daylight Savings. I don’t know why we get ours a week later but we do. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It seems highly likely that if you saw ‘Avalanche’ you would have trouble remembering if you did. What’s an example of a ‘strong people’ show? Love explaining to me why our producer made us take the words ‘a film by Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley’ out of the opening credits of the festival screener version of our film because it might ‘offend the financiers’ which he knows we don’t have, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Bagbuss’ looks most curious indeed, yes. Whoa, new PT episode already? You’re on fire, or I’m on fire and you’re lighting me. ** Steve, Any luck by the end of the workday, I hope? Everyone, Two new reviews from Steve, of Gouge Away’s DEEP SAGE here and Kim Gordon’s THE COLLECTIVE here. No, the Oscars start at 2 am my time, way past my bedtime. Seems extremely predictable from everything I’ve read. Happy Wes Anderson won one. Don’t care about the rest really. I think I saw ‘Devil Doll’, I can’t remember. I’ll peek or re-peek. Thanks. ** video_video, I did, and, yes, it’s totally killer. Ooh, internet sleuthing, let me think. That definitely could come in very handy. Thank you a bunch. No, I don’t know ‘August Underground’. I’m not sure I’ve even heard of it before. What’s your opinion? I’m guessing I should jump on it? Pray tell. Yes, it’s a real pleasure to be in touch with you. ** Cori, Hi, Cori. Thanks, I do try. Film Forum is great, a huge boon for LA and has been for decades. ‘LA Plays Itself’, I know. It’s a total classic. I love Thom Anderson’s films. One of the last times I was in LA I saw a retrospective of his films at the Academy Museum. Did you catch the John Waters retrospective there while it was up. I didn’t, of course, but so wish I had. I haven’t seen ‘Blonde Death’, which is strange because I was friends with the director Robert James Baker. You liked it? Should I hunt it? It’s possible to get published by a major press without an agent, but it’s quite hard, especially if you’re a new writer. With the indie presses, which is where virtually all the books I read are published, you don’t need an agent really. For years I had an amazing agent, really lucky, super dedicated and passionate. My current agent is a disaster. I don’t think I’m even going to bother to have her field my next books with publishers and just do it myself. But I’m a known quantity, so that’s easier. Anyway, I wouldn’t sweat too much about agents right now until you think it’s absolutely time. Thank you! ** Dengue Fever, Hi. It bolsters my interior life that you think of me, especially under those circumstances. I will sheepishly admit I’m not sure who Dengue Fever contains, but maybe god planned it that way? Anyway, hi, and I will endeavor to think of you at confronting points today. xo. ** Darby😌, Cool, welcome to the early bird club. So, did it fit? Oh, shit, or hopefully not ‘oh shit’, about court tomorrow. Let me know the deal. I’ve never been to the Caribbean, but I’ve been to Hawaii a bunch of times. My dad lived there. I even toured a sugarcane factory, and it had the most nauseating odor I have ever experienced. I can still remember the smell, and I still urp when I do. Sleeplessness, ugh, the fucking worst. Tchaikovsky is too dramatic for me, but I’m into drones and stuff. I hope he woke you completely up at least. ** Justin, Hi, J. Weekend did the trick, thanks. My pleasure on the Geiser intro. I haven’t seen ‘Perfect Days’, but I’m curious. I haven’t liked a Wenders film since ‘Wings of Desire’, but people have said he has regained his mojo. I’ll find an illegal link to it or something. Thanks, pal. ** Uday, Storage space? Wtf. How unimaginative. Surely you guys’ proposal can top that. Frat guys like you. That’s something. I don’t really know any frat guys, but I guess I can imagine them being nice. Thank you for your kind words. No, I’ve never been anywhere in Southeast Asia. Have long wanted to, Cambodia and Vietnam especially for some reason. And curious seeming, sex vacation-promising Thailand. The closest I’ve been is Hong Kong, if that’s even close. Why do you ask, my friend? ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. Thanks. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever read LA Record before or since. Ah, of course, an alias. Eli Wallace, cool. I’m distantly related to Sam Houston of the Alamo fame. And a cousin of mine starred in a couple of James Bridges films: ‘Urban Cowboy’ and ‘Mike’s Murder’. Uh, let me think about late April re: Paris event musts. Nothing pops to mind yet. I don’t know anyone who’s done anything with Light Cone, but that’s a great idea. There’s also Re:Voir who are concentrated on experimental film and have an exhibition space and do film screenings at a nearby theater in the 10th, but I’ve never worked with them either. ** Right. Today my galerie presents a show by the photographer and digital artist Amir Zaki, an artist based in Los Angeles whose work I really like, and who has a show up right now in LA if anyone’s there and interested. See you tomorrow.