Vaux (Chateau Thierry Sector) 1917 - 1918

Edward Steichen made this photograph, Vaux, of the Chateau Thierry Sector, using, well, a camera. It's a war photograph, but it doesn’t feel like propaganda to me. Looking at all the tones and textures, I think about mark-making, and how Steichen constructed an image using light and shadow. The photograph is printed in a kind of brownish gray, and the whole thing reads like a very worked surface; it’s a meditation on devastation. There’s a road that cuts through the center of the frame and leads our eye, in its own kind of march, to the horizon. All around are these ruined buildings, reduced to rubble. When I look closely, I notice how each little piece of debris, each mark, is like a brushstroke in a painting. Maybe it reminds me a little of some of Gerhard Richter's gray paintings, but obviously with a very different subject and sensibility. Both artists, though, are interested in the process of image-making, and the way images can convey information, but also emotion. Ultimately, it is the image’s ambiguity that makes it so compelling.