with Tim Davis, Lisa Kereszi, and Mathew Pokoik

Reflection by Shea Settimi

“…This was back in the 70’s. I was sitting with my dad and his friends in a cloud of blue pot smoke looking at cigarette ads for subliminal messages. That’s how I learned about photography—that there could be a lot of meaning packed into a photographic image, whether it’s real or not.”

Thus began “SIGNS and the Language of Photography,” the final installment in Mt. Tremper Arts’s Thursday Night Lecture Series. The above quote is from Tim Davis, who along with Lisa Kereszi and Mathew Pokoik (who curated SIGNS) showed slides of their work and talked about how and why they photograph signs.

Signs communicate. Photographs communicate. But what does a photograph of a sign communicate? Davis showed a slide of a photograph he made of a huge red painting of the United States, inexpertly rendered on the side of an abandoned building. “It’s the perfect symbol of America,” said Davis. “A distorted, stretched-out, blood-red map of the US used to cover up a failed business venture.”

©Tim Davis,

The discussion reminded me of a cruise I took with my family in Alaska. Out of all the majestic natural beauty that I saw, what I ended up taking pictures of were the signs on the cruise ship. Signs telling one what can and cannot be flushed down the toilet, telling one how to indicate a desire for fresh towels, telling one where to go in case of an emergency. My amusement and confusion at these signs created the photographs as much as my Canon PowerShot digital camera did.

“I had a professor who said I didn’t have the love of language to be a poet,” said Lisa Kereszi. “He drove me right into the arms of the photography department. But I never lost my fascination with language.”

Kereszi showed a series of photos in her slide show that didn’t look like signs at all. One was a straight-on shot of a brushed stainless steel water fountain. The photograph lacked text, but all the same seemed to scream: WATER FOUNTAIN. “I get kind of myopic,” Kereszi said of her process. “It’s like I’ve been dropped into this place to see this thing and show it to people.”

The artists took questions and comments from the audience. Marcel Duchamp’s name was brought up more than once. “Ready-made [art] paved the way for photography,” said Kereszi. “Everything is sort of there, and it’s your experience that makes you notice it and want to communicate it. It’s a shift from the artist-as-creative-genius to the artist-as-looking-at-something-in-the-world.”

Mathew Pokoik showed slides of photographs he’s made in different parts of the world: a pile of brightly colored athletic-type bags that create a sort of mosaic. Another photograph showed a riot of hanging t-shirts of every color. Another was a mind-bending pastiche of images hanging in a sales kiosk—a picture of a Caucasian baby wearing a Santa hat in one corner, traditional Indian deities occupying the center.

Pokoik talked about the art photographer versus the photographer who is entering the world as it happens. “I began wondering—are these distinctions still relevant? All photographs are illusions yet we have an implicit trust in the veracity of images even in our modern digital age.”

Pokoik’s photographs evoke the strange bedfellows that globalization creates. A billboard of a lightened and airbrushed Beyoncé looms over a crowd of Asian pedestrians, blurred in their movements. He asked, “How does the media and image-culture create the tenuous but powerful illusion of centrality?”

The panel participants were refreshingly articulate, talking about their work and about photography in a way that even a layperson such as myself could appreciate. Towards the end of the discussion, the question of the photographer’s judgment of his or her subject came up. Pokoik, referencing the Walker Evans photograph of an early twentieth century minstrel poster that is on display in the SIGNS show, questioned whether the artist who captures and communicates a slice of contemporary reality is making a judgment about his subject at all.

This, to me, is the most intriguing issue that the lecture—and that photography and art in general—raised for me: Is it even possible to separate the artist’s mind from the mind of the person who looks at the photograph? Or to separate the artist’s mind from the subject he or she is photographing? It seems to me that in creating a work of art and seeing a work of art, these boundaries are not clear, perhaps not even there at all. And to attribute an attitude or judgment to the artist seems slippery when looked at more deeply. Where does one’s experience of a work of art come from? What is it? And in photographs especially, the ideas of time and space also seem to slip away as the conditions that caused the artist to open the shutter in that particular place, at that particular time, resonate in my present experience of seeing it.