ISBN 978 90 5330 820 2 © 2014 Matt Gunther, New York www.mattgunther.com © 2014 Magical Thinking, New York © 2014 Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam www.schiltpublishing.com
DESIGN HvA Design, New York www.hvadesign.com TEXT CORRECTION Kumar Jamdagni, Zwolle www.language-matters.nl PRINT & LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT KOMESO GmbH, Stuttgart www.komeso.com PRINTING Offizin Scheufele, Stuttgart www.scheufele.de
Distribution in North America Ingram Publisher Services One Ingram Blvd. LaVergne, TN 37086 IPS: 866-765-0179 E-mail: customer.service@ingrampublisherservices.com Distribution in the Netherlands Centraal Boekhuis, Culemborg Distribution in all other countries Thames & Hudson Ltd 181a High Holborn London WC1V 7QX Phone: +44 (0)20 7845 5000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7845 5055 E-mail: sales@thameshudson.co.uk Magical Thinking is a not-for-profit publishing and educational initiative founded by Joshua Lutz and Tara Cronin in 2010. Its commitment is to furthering our understanding of the importance of how images function, and revolves around a programme of books, exhibitions and educational workshops. Schilt Publishing books, limited editions and prints are available online via www.schiltpublishing.com Inquiries via sales@schiltpublishing.com
ISBN 978 90 5330 820 2 © 2014 Matt Gunther, New York www.mattgunther.com © 2014 Magical Thinking, New York © 2014 Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam www.schiltpublishing.com
DESIGN HvA Design, New York www.hvadesign.com TEXT CORRECTION Kumar Jamdagni, Zwolle www.language-matters.nl PRINT & LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT KOMESO GmbH, Stuttgart www.komeso.com PRINTING Offizin Scheufele, Stuttgart www.scheufele.de
Distribution in North America Ingram Publisher Services One Ingram Blvd. LaVergne, TN 37086 IPS: 866-765-0179 E-mail: customer.service@ingrampublisherservices.com Distribution in the Netherlands Centraal Boekhuis, Culemborg Distribution in all other countries Thames & Hudson Ltd 181a High Holborn London WC1V 7QX Phone: +44 (0)20 7845 5000 Fax: +44 (0)20 7845 5055 E-mail: sales@thameshudson.co.uk Magical Thinking is a not-for-profit publishing and educational initiative founded by Joshua Lutz and Tara Cronin in 2010. Its commitment is to furthering our understanding of the importance of how images function, and revolves around a programme of books, exhibitions and educational workshops. Schilt Publishing books, limited editions and prints are available online via www.schiltpublishing.com Inquiries via sales@schiltpublishing.com
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probable cause matt gunther
MAGICAL THINKING
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probable cause matt gunther
MAGICAL THINKING
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matthew sharpe
Probable Cause “We shape our buildings, and afterwards they shape us.”
[w i n s to n
c h u rc h i l l ]
You are walking through a marsh. The sky is overcast, but a golden light emanates from the thickly growing reeds that surround you. You are looking, maybe, for civilization, and you find it—or at least the signs of it—ahead of you, on the other side of an oblong pool of water. Civilization is also in the pool, or on it: a reflection of the poles that hold up the wires that convey electrical current to the distant buildings on the horizon. There is a lone building within walking distance, just on the other side of the water, a small white one-story structure with a big red sign on top, lit up, too, by the current in the wires that surround it. All that is missing from this place where nature merges with human habitation are the humans. There is not a soul in sight. You are looking, it seems, not at a long-defunct civilization, but at one abandoned ten minutes ago. What, you might ask, was the probable cause of the people’s flight from this place? Was a threat coming from somewhere? Or was the threat already present in the myriad and ineluctable criss-crossings of the power lines, in the distant spires and boxes that prevent the gaze and perhaps the body itself from reaching the horizon—the threat, that is, not to civilization, but of civilization? The above is one of several images in Matt Gunther’s Probable Cause that contain the infrastructure that supports humanity—buildings, smokestacks, bridges, streets, cars, lights— but no humans. The sociologist Erving Goffman suggests that a public building or place of business is designed to allow an individual to perform a job much as a stage set is designed to allow an actor to perform a role, and that every job is, in a sense, a theatrical performance; as such, each job comes with an optimum staging area and set of props. And Goffman argues that all of human interaction is a kind of theater whose ultimate purpose is not the production of plays, but the production of actions and interactions valued and esteemed by a given community. But Gunther’s photographs—whose main subject is the police department in New Jersey’s largest city, Newark—hint at a less comfortable relationship between the humans and the buildings and streets in which they act out their lives. So even in the vast majority of the images in Probable Cause, where humans do appear, they are often just a small part of a frame filled with things built and made. A woman, for instance, is talking on the phone, her
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matthew sharpe
Probable Cause “We shape our buildings, and afterwards they shape us.”
[w i n s to n
c h u rc h i l l ]
You are walking through a marsh. The sky is overcast, but a golden light emanates from the thickly growing reeds that surround you. You are looking, maybe, for civilization, and you find it—or at least the signs of it—ahead of you, on the other side of an oblong pool of water. Civilization is also in the pool, or on it: a reflection of the poles that hold up the wires that convey electrical current to the distant buildings on the horizon. There is a lone building within walking distance, just on the other side of the water, a small white one-story structure with a big red sign on top, lit up, too, by the current in the wires that surround it. All that is missing from this place where nature merges with human habitation are the humans. There is not a soul in sight. You are looking, it seems, not at a long-defunct civilization, but at one abandoned ten minutes ago. What, you might ask, was the probable cause of the people’s flight from this place? Was a threat coming from somewhere? Or was the threat already present in the myriad and ineluctable criss-crossings of the power lines, in the distant spires and boxes that prevent the gaze and perhaps the body itself from reaching the horizon—the threat, that is, not to civilization, but of civilization? The above is one of several images in Matt Gunther’s Probable Cause that contain the infrastructure that supports humanity—buildings, smokestacks, bridges, streets, cars, lights— but no humans. The sociologist Erving Goffman suggests that a public building or place of business is designed to allow an individual to perform a job much as a stage set is designed to allow an actor to perform a role, and that every job is, in a sense, a theatrical performance; as such, each job comes with an optimum staging area and set of props. And Goffman argues that all of human interaction is a kind of theater whose ultimate purpose is not the production of plays, but the production of actions and interactions valued and esteemed by a given community. But Gunther’s photographs—whose main subject is the police department in New Jersey’s largest city, Newark—hint at a less comfortable relationship between the humans and the buildings and streets in which they act out their lives. So even in the vast majority of the images in Probable Cause, where humans do appear, they are often just a small part of a frame filled with things built and made. A woman, for instance, is talking on the phone, her
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