ŁÓDŹ, OCTOBER 1, 2004
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS, 2004
Alright... It's a photograph, but it acts like somebody in a very expensive suit who keeps telling you he's actually 'low-key'. Start with the cloth. It's perfect. White cotton, little blue squares, rolling off the press and folding itself into a neat stack on a cart. Crisp. Exact. Spotless by the yard. Now look at the room around it. Peeling paint. Crumbling brick. One bare fluorescent tube. Somebody's thrown a plastic sheet over the machine to keep the dust off. This is a textile mill in Poland, and the place is falling apart. The cloth has no idea. Blank fabric goes in one end, clean pattern comes out the other, and none of that room makes it onto the surface. That's the machine's whole job. Take the mess and leave it behind. Which is pretty much what a camera does. Something specific and cluttered and complicated goes in. A clean, flat surface comes out. A lot of photographers figure that out and spend the rest of their careers pointing at it. Christopher Williams goes the other way. He shoots like he's making a catalog. Hires the crew, the technicians, the hand models. Controls every inch of the frame. So... He's not making 'fun' of advertising. He's doing it 'better' than the ads do. That's the 'expensive suit'. And get this... His father worked in special effects in Hollywood, so Williams grew up around people whose whole job was making the illusion hold together. He's the magician's kid. He's watched the cape get ironed. And that plastic sheet over the machine? Somebody got paid to hang that. Nothing in this frame gets to be innocent. So here he is. A guy who makes clean surfaces, standing in front of a machine that makes clean surfaces. And look what he does here. Any normal catalog would crop this down to the cloth. Lose the wall. Lose the fluorescent tube. Lose the tarp. Williams keeps all of it. Then shoots the whole mess like it's for sale.