Noel Rodo-Vankeulen

In a recent interview, photographer Jessica Eaton expressed jealousy of the freedom of early modernist photographers like Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, who were unencumbered by any distinction between fine-art photography and non-art photography—indeed, they worked before the legitimization of photography as an art at all. “They could make the most experimental, surreal photographs one day, and then a conventional portrait of someone the next,” she said, “and that made sense as two ways of asking the same question.” The fact that photography is a technology with so many potential uses has always haunted its practice as an art. What sets the photographs we see in museums, galleries and art magazines apart from the photographs we see in newspapers, advertisements, fashion magazines and on our Facebook profiles? Digitization has made this an even more fraught question. When we can use our phones and computers to take and edit photos, most of which will circulate digitally without ever being turned into prints, the context that differentiates art photographs from other kinds of images becomes thinner than the screens on which we look at them.

Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, who is both a talented photographer and an astute writer on photography (he has, in fact, written on the work of Jessica Eaton), makes these issues a key theme in his work. On his website, you can find experimental, surreal abstractions alongside portraits of varying degrees of conventionality, as well as landscapes, studies of architecture, textures, atmospheres and a few things that inhabit the liminal zones of photography: glitches, scans, appropriated and manipulated images. Many art photographers would be hesitant to shoot, or at least to exhibit, such a variety; developing a reputation and a signature style often entails sticking to one thing. But Rodo-Vankeulen is less interested in doing everything that it’s possible to do with photography than he is in thinking about how the multifarious places in which we encounter photographs condition the way we see them. This self-conscious and conceptually inflected approach does ultimately infuse his body of work with a recognizable look that combines detachment and seduction. Rodo-Vankeulen doesn’t just take photos of diverse subject matters, he assembles a catalogue of photographic tropes, types, cliches and experiments and sets them against each other to see how each works.

In conversation, Rodo-Vankeulen alludes to his interest in what he calls the “stupid image”—perhaps surprising, given that “Eyes Without a Face,” his second exhibition at Toronto’s O’Born Contemporary (the first was a group show with like-minded colleague Robert Canali), included some of his smartest and most stylish pictures. What he means by the “stupid image” is not kitsch—or not exactly, anyway. It’s more like everyday occurrences of the spectacular. Think, for instance, of a sunset, or a waterfall shot with a dramatic lens flare, perhaps encountered on a calendar or a postcard. These are photographic tricks, essentially, easily recognizable and utterly familiar. And yet they don’t cease to work on us. As theorist Boris Groys has observed, “In terms of aesthetic experience, no work of art can stand compari-son to even an average beautiful sunset.” In Rodo-Vankeulen’s past work, he has been particularly good at isolating these kinds of subject matter and effects and deploying them with subtle quotation marks. “Eyes Without a Face” included a piece entitled Sunset that may even be above-average in terms of beautiful sunsets. Without any horizon line or foreground objects to judge, however, it may take the viewer a few moments to realize that the particularly otherworldly quality of this sunset derives from it being upside down. These kinds of sly displacements—simple, obvious but effective—are typical of Rodo-Vankeulen’s work, though sometimes the distancing operation lies between pictures rather than within them. Goldfinch (Summer Plumage), a softly lit, black-and-white photo of a bird regarding its reflection in an ornate mirror, would court kitsch if it weren’t hung next to an abstract triptych titled Tungsten Movement, in which spectral shadows (including Rodo-Vankeulen’s hand) cast against his studio wall are captured in vivid orange hues.

In this, as in a number of works in “Eyes Without a Face,” Rodo-Vankeulen takes photographic effects as his principal subject matter to produce striking abstractions. The simply-titled Light captures a glare pouring in from a slash in a flat surface, while Green Cutting Board, Twin and the four images in his “Clock Tile” series explore various digital manipulations: colour shifts, the clone stamp and tiling effects. Each exudes a particular aura of mystery: we both do and do not know what we are looking at. What Rodo-Vankeulen wants to highlight is what he calls the “visible invisible,” the condition of being aware of manipulated images without always being able to identify how and where they’ve been altered, and the combination of distrust and allure that arises there. In an economy of vision defined by glut and flux, we are always suspicious but still susceptible. Like Rodo-Vankeulen’s goldfinch, we might not know what we’re looking at, even though it moves us. ❚

“Eyes Without a Face” was exhibited at O’Born Contemporary in Toronto from November 17 to December 22, 2012. Saelan Twerdy is a freelance writer and doctoral student in Art History at McGill University in Montreal.