Knowledge of the Raw by David Seltzer

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ERIC FISCHL ON DAVID SELTZER From looking at the photographs in his monograph, Knowledge of the Raw, I imagine David Seltzer to be a man with a gruff and smoky voice, rough hands, and a demeanor that exudes impatience and passion. When I look at his photographs, I hear voices. I hear the voices in his head and I imagine a man who talks to himself loud enough and clear enough for us to overhear him.

Seltzer’s photos are like “note-to-self ” pieces that capture the energy of someone trying keep pace with himself, to locate himself, not in the photo but in that very place at the moment the photo is taken. You have a sense in each photograph that the skin, the interface between the inside and the outside, is absolutely permeable and completely vulnerable.

Take, for example, his nudes. They aren’t posed nor elevated to the status of classical erotic beauty. They are complicated by the inherent ambivalence we feel towards their nakedness by their physicality and intimacy. These are not models. These are the women you have sex with, and lunch with, and travel with, and talk to. They are smart, supple and playful, willingly giving themselves over to our erotic imagination, but not overstatedly erotic. That is to say, these photos are not the product of the artistic pursuit of sophisticated erotic styling.

These are the sexual fantasies permissible within the agreed

upon boundaries of intimate relationships. They are tender, curious, playful and very, very realistic.

He is less an explorer than a frontiersman. He lives physically and psychically in a place that is sparsely populated, hardscrabble, overcast – a place where self-reliance is a requisite for surviving constant uncertainty. His photos are questions asked long ago, still waiting for answers.

When you pick up his book, you can open it anywhere and page backwards or forwards. It doesn’t matter. The photos don’t follow a chronology or a sustained narrative. The book is more like a diary, a portrait of a life being lived. The photos are printed, painted, scrawled onto, scratched into, clawed at, and defaced. He uses black not as light or absence of light but as mineral, as ore: physical, dense, sooty, not to be inhaled.

As promised in his title Knowledge of the Raw, Seltzer does not soften the blows. One feels the full weight of the dramas in his life, grasping, catching, holding on and then, sadly, the loosening grip. The effect of this slippage is heartbreak. These powerful works are the result of a protracted conversation he has been having with himself about women, about God, about the bending and breaking of the soul, about the loneliness and isolation of aging, and about weather.

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