Abstracts

Photographically speaking, the key move with these images is that they present details that are not fragments, visual particulars that are not clues to a visual entirety. In effect, Salzmann inverts common assumptions about photographic reference: what we see does not gain meaning by participating in a world beyond itself—a world it effectively converts to a contextual surround. It indicates little or nothing about some larger imagined plenum of space and time that we might observe, and offers little in the way of mediation of that larger world, eschewing even the role of recording it for reproduction. Rather, Salzmann’s images present us with imagistic actualities whose reference to actualities outside of or on the other side of themselves is incidental. The images are self-sufficient. They are not replacements for an observed world—tokens, symbols, residual indices—but displacements of one observable world into the terms of another. The events that we see in these images are not, in other words, pictorialized events of the world, but pictorial events—events that start and end only as pictures.