Turning a Negative Into a Positive

A comparable push and pull between relinquishing and reclaiming control shows up in the work of Maier-Aichen. He took most of the images in his Blum & Poe exhibition with 8x10 cameras, unwieldy machines that can weigh upward of 10 pounds, including an aerial one he sometimes takes up in helicopters to shoot postcard-friendly vistas.

“When you use that big of a camera, it’s very mechanical. ... It’s really the opposite of a snapshot,” he says. “Detail ... doesn’t show that much, and it’s very precious. You can just take one or two images.”

Courtesy of M+B, Los Angeles and the artist

Carlo Van de Roer's photo of Miranda July, taken using an Aura camera, which supposedly "shows" the subject's psychic energy

Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

This untitled aerial snapshot was a "complete screw up," says the artist, Florian Maier-Aichen. It was taken on a whim then rephotographed in the studio using outdated infrared film.

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Regen Projects

6750 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Category: Art Galleries

Region: West Hollywood

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Blum & Poe

2727 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Category: Art Galleries

Region: West L.A.

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M+B Gallery

612 N. Almont Drive
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Category: Art Galleries

Region: West Hollywood

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More About

• Florian Maier-Aichen
• Walead Beshty
• Carlo Van de Roer
• Blum & Poe Gallery
• James Frey

The 8x10 often leaves him with nostalgic-looking images; Maier-Aichen draws back into them, using Photoshop and other digital tools. The result is imagery that seems both antiquated and futuristic, as in the Östersjön prints in his current show, named after Sweden’s Baltic coast but taken in the studio, with an abstract, painted triangle standing in for mountains and dark dye as waves. Made using an early tricolor process (B&W photos are taken with red, blue and green lenses and then superimposed over each other), the images have a crisp color palette that contrasts with their mechanical imprecision. He used the same technique for his photo of Geiranger Fjord, an iconic Norwegian landscape, in which a veil of red and green floats above a slightly marred and dotted surface. “I think there is hardly any room for screwups when you take digital photographs,” says Maier-Aichen, “and that’s why I still like to stick to film.”

Probably no other medium has become as produced and packaged as photography, which is why these three exhibitions feel muscular in the way they make space for collisions. “The idea of a [medium’s] zero point was never that interesting to me,” says Beshty, who prefers to focus on how photography, or media in general, reinvent themselves.

His work, like Maier-Aichen’s and Van de Roer’s, uses strategy and technology not to assert an authorial vision but to build a history made up of accidents, bringing process and product together in a way that feels vulnerable, visceral and seductively honest because it can’t be fully controlled.

Walead Beshty’s “ProcessColorfield” at Regen Projects, Carlo Van de Roer’s “The Portrait Machine” at M+B Gallery and Florian Maier-Aichen’s self-titled exhibition at Blum & Poe all are on view through May 14.