Double Negatives
Esther Choi is a New York City–based multidisciplinary artist with a background in photography and architectural history and theory. Her work primarily explores how world-making and image-making technologies have shaped concepts and representations of nature. She is the creator of the artist’s book Le Corbuffet: Edible Art and Design Classics (Prestel, 2019), and she coedited the collected volumes Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia University Press, 2017). Her commissioned photography has been featured in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, AnOther Magazine, Elle Decor, Vice, Dazed and Confused, Le Monde, and The New York Times Magazine.
It’s difficult to imagine contemporary photographic image culture outside the seismic velocity of circulation that has characterized pictures and their display. Any online search will reveal a surplus of discarded imagery: a seemingly ahistorical and authorless “junkspace” of commodities. Yet beyond lamenting the heap of visual spam that has characterized our image economy, how might this landscape of photographic excess connect to other systems predicated on a similar logic of disposability and accumulation? Choi’s talk reflects on these conditions by examining photography’s evolution as an industrial commodity during the twentieth century, produced in tandem with the plastics industry and driven by the values and infrastructures of petromodernism. By exploring photography’s relationship with its plastic substrate, Choi proposes that we can gain insight into the philosophical connections between the two mediums and their shared principles and promises.