“The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention, Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry. It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,” ~ Wallace Stevens, “The Course of a Particular” On Flickr, on Instagram, on whatever image-sharing platform one might happens across: it seems … Read more

“The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention, Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry. It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,” ~ Wallace Stevens, “The Course of a Particular” On Flickr, on Instagram, on whatever image-sharing platform one might happens across: it seems impossible avoiding the stagnant redundancy of so many imitations. There are more than enough cheap knock-offs of Robert Frank, of Nan Goldin, of countless fashion photographers, and even of the garishness of Martin Parr. While the breakthrough work of these photographers represented in its era essential and decisive breaks with the photographic traditions preceding them, their respective approaches to photography have today been effectively reduced to the level of cliché by their admirers and emulators. While Frank, for instance, has himself moved in his recent work well beyond the desaturated sterility of The Americans, so few of those who take his work a stylistic starting point have. It is against this litany of fads that the work of József Pataki stands out most strongly. As a genre, his body of work defies ready description: not still life, not purely scenic, not street photography per se… in place of the drama of human involvement is a singular concentration of the materiality of the world and — seemingly — the myriad ways in which this reality unfolds its geometric possibilities. The photos themselves, most captured via TLR on black and white film, evince a classical sense of exposure appreciation — whether Pataki is indeed an adherent of the “Zone” system of exposure determination I do not know, but a similar result seems to be his aim. But it is the composition and selection process that most fully differentiates his work. There we stand face-to-face with a world that is as near to us as it is alien from us: tire tracks, shadows, atmosphere, labor, etc etc… All exquisitely framed and captured with the intensity that others reserve for human portraiture. His images allow us — INVITE US — to stand back from the flow of time where these mundane objects pass by often unnoticed; and confront the simultaneous austerity and lushness of this world. “In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.”