LOOK INSIDE: Signs and Visions

Fo rew o rd

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HERE IS A PECULIAR QUIET IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS of Peter von zur Muehlen, a quiet that feels less like absence than presence. The streets, alleys, and marginal spaces he records seem emptied of people, yet they pulse with unmistakable evidence of human life: rusted metal, cracked pavement, graffitied walls layered like, the truly gaudy and the washed-out, construction sites, and abandoned ornament. These are not simply remnants. They are signs and signals, an unfinished sentence written by the city. von zur Muehlen’s photographs belong to a tradition that finds poetry in the overlooked. Working largely between the late 1970s and early 1980s, often during lunchtime walks through the back passages of Washington, D.C., he found his subjects where few others thought to look. The service alleys and forgotten corners of Northwest Washington, the industrial edges of Northern Virginia, and occasional journeys to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City provided terrain where the accidental could reveal an underlying order.

Like the photographs of Aaron Siskind, which transformed peeling walls and scattered debris into abstract compositions, von zur Muehlen’s work occupies a space between documentation and abstraction. The camera records what is there, yet what emerges is something more distilled: geometry in a broken fence, a field of color in spilled paint, and a fragile equilibrium among unrelated objects that chance has placed together.

The ordinary becomes a still life assembled by time, weather, and human neglect.

There is also a temporal urgency in these images von zur Muehlen understood that the industrial lots, back alleys, and vacant edges of cities he wandered through would inevitably disappear. Urban renewal, redevelopment, or simple erosion would erase them.

His photographs therefore become acts of preservation, holding for a moment what the city itself is constantly shedding.

In the poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose lines appear in this volume, reality lies within the act of perception. von zur Muehlen’s photographs inhabit that same territory. They do not answer questions; they keep them open. In these images, a stain of oil, a fragment of machinery, or a broken fence becomes a sign we are left to read. Looking closely and discovering unexpected beauty within the residue of everyday life becomes the quiet revelation of these subtle compositions.

Jack Rasmussen, C. Nicholas Keating and Carleen B. Keating Director American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC

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Arlington , Virginia,1983 5

In t roduc t i o n

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OST OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS BOOK date from 1976 to 1983, with a scattering in later years up 2018. Many come from lunch-hour walks into the alleys and passageways of Northwest Washington, D.C. Others I took either during trips away from home or on drives around the suburbs of Northern Virginia. For me, they represent a combination of street photography and urban landscape art that bridges documentary and abstract aesthetics.

Many of the scenes depicting drab mundanity often appeared to me as color abstractions that I controlled, yielding an aesthetic order to what was, in reality, the chaos of neglect.

I sought to relate things unrelated except by accident. Most often, I was just drawn to the unintended anomalies and surreal juxtapositions confronting my camera.

Intended as such or not, all of the scenes struck me as some kind of communication—signs and signals testifying to an indelible human presence. In my wanderings through empty alleys of Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City, it was important for me to record places I knew would eventually vanish in the mist of history, victims to urban renewal—or simply disappear for no apparent reason.

I cannot say for certain if any photographer has influenced my work, although I feel a kinship with some, notably Harry Callahan, whose color photographs of cityscapes were made during the same time I photographed back alleys. More of an actual inspiration may have been Aaron Siskind, whose abstract work, focused on patterns and textures of such subjects as coiled ropes, footprints in sand, and seaweed, was itself influenced by the abstract painters Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko—all painters whom I also admire. It appears that Siskind recognized something in my photography that appealed to him, because in 1975, having curated a group show of Virginia Photographers at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, he awarded me a solo museum exhibit of my black and white still lifes.

Most of all, I admire the work of William Eggleston, whose 1989 monograph, “The Democratic Forest,” also focuses on the mundane world around us, but with a palette of far more muted colors than mine.

I begin this book with a series of Polaroid-SXs made between 1976 and 1978. This work motivated my later work with medium format Kodak color film, using a Hasselblad at first, but then, in 1980, having tired of the formal seductiveness of it its square format, switching to the Mamiya 6x9’s more challenging rectangular format. Beginning in late 1983, I began using a compromise format with a Pentax 6x7 camera. Later, in the 2000s, I dropped analog film and photographed with an iPhone.

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Annandale, Virginia 1979 7

SX-70 1976-1978 Impressions on Mylar

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HAT MOST DREW ME TO POLAROID SX-70 photography during the late seventies was the film’s imperfections and the often randomness of outcomes—and its ability to provide instant satisfaction. The images that whirred out of this little instrument had an opaqueness that gave them a dreamlike quality. With its soft undersaturated palette and its tendency toward translucency, the film/print became a means of turning landscapes and urban scenery into miniature still lifes, evoking earlier snapshot photography. Sadly, Polaroid kept “improving” its product until it had lost much of its charms. That is when I turned to standard color film photography.

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Prince William County, Virginia 1977 9

Arlington, Virginia 1979 28

Arlington, Virginia 1979 29

Fairfax County, Virginia 1979 40

Fairfax County, Virginia 1979 41

Reston, Virginia 1980 64

Baltimore, Maryland 1980 65

Alexandria, Virginia 1979 68

Fairfax County, Virginia 1979 69

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Ocean City, Maryland 1982

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Campbell’s Soup, Moro Bay, California 1980 112