The Hollywood Suites (Bound Doors) #7 1976

Steve Kahn made this photograph, "The Hollywood Suites (Bound Doors) #7," date unknown, with gelatin silver print. It’s a stark, black and white image, but for me the first thing that jumps out is the string, those bright white lines crisscrossing the dark void of the doorway. The surface has this cool, almost gritty feel, which is interesting. You can almost feel the texture of the door, the slight imperfections in the paint. It feels like he captured a real moment, a real place, and yet those graphic lines pull it away from pure representation. It's a record of a performance, maybe? I keep thinking about what it means to literally bind a door. It’s an image about being stuck, about being held, but made so beautifully and carefully. It reminds me of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, using architecture as a kind of readymade to play with space and ideas of access. But in the end, it's really about how Steve Kahn saw the world, the questions he was asking through his work.