ŁÓDŹ, OCTOBER 1, 2004
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS, 2004
Look at this thing. It's a photograph, but it behaves like someone in a very expensive suit who keeps insisting he's 'low-key'. And the first thing you notice is how controlled everything is. Crisp. Exact. No wasted motion. It's got that hyper-clean photographic look where nothing seems accidental — which of course means everything is. You're looking at fabric being made in a Polish textile factory. Pattern rolling through a machine. Totally normal industrial scene. Except Williams didn't come here to document textile production. He came because this factory is basically doing what photography does. Think about it. The fabric goes through rollers — gets flattened, aligned, repeated. Messy raw material goes in, clean orderly pattern comes out. That is exactly what a camera does to the world. Takes something physical, specific, complicated — and irons it into an image. Removes the noise. Removes the smell. Removes the labor. Leaves you with a surface that looks natural and inevitable, even though it got processed to within an inch of its life. Williams makes photographs the way casinos pump oxygen — everything designed so you don't notice the system, while the system is the entire point. His pictures always feel dressed too well. Beautiful, orderly, a little deadpan funny. The pattern on that cloth starts looking like modern art, or a color calibration chart — one of those things a printer uses to make sure it isn't lying. Which is funny, because photography is basically a very elegant liar. Not evil. Just polished. This whole photograph is like watching a magician iron his cape. You're not seeing the rabbit. You're seeing the maintenance of the illusion. And that's the real subject. Not the factory. Not the fabric. The conversion. How the world goes from thing to picture. From labor to surface.