It’s commonplace to say that there is now a certain ambiguity in how we think about and use photography, given that the thread of reference that once defined the medium has been so undermined by changing technology. Yet the very individual work of Michelle Kloehn treats this quality as if it had always been present in photography, a sort of enigmatic reticence whereby the medium becomes a complicated surface for meaning, one that is never quite revealed.
Working for the most part with large tintypes she has created a body of images that successfully integrate this dimension of photography back into its history, both materially with regard to the technique she uses, but also in a conceptual sense, because although the images are themselves concrete they manage not to fully resolve into any particular sense of what they are about or what is happening within the frame. Kloehn suggests an alternative trajectory for the development of photography, one grounded in a disappearance of her subject into the process by which it becomes visible.
Though she risks an understanding of her work as somehow nostalgic, just in the simple comparison of its hand-made qualities to the more disembodied process we’re now so familiar with, Kloehn avoids this reading by a clearly systematic approach to her subject matter, studio constructions mostly, without any overt emotional content. This suggestive emptiness inevitably turns us back to our experience of the medium and indeed the contradictory nature of visual perception itself.
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