A catalogue of human traces

by Jessica Kindred

Martin Meyer shoots what remains. The material of everyday life and death on
the street. A dead pigeon, cat, rodent, squirrel. Accidents of everyday
expression. A plastic doll fallen in a cake, her nose white with frosting.
Jesus Christ's senior picture hanging from the rear view mirror. The fallen
and the raised. Religious paraphernalia. Nationalistic displays. Epithets in
aerosol. A dashboard hero pirouette. There's a story being told here. It
happens in the daytime, it happens in the light. It's a story about the
streets and the city, what's on the ground and in the windows, what is
dropped and what displayed, what discarded and what made. Candies melting in
the snow. A bird's guts jettisoned from its broken body by the tire of a
car. A dead cat mid-step. This is a visual dictionary of the moment we are
in, a catalogue of human traces, an archeology of our effect. What is absent
is the people themselves, except for one, the gatekeeper of the apocalypse,
naked and oiled on a rubble beach. This is almost a world after them, but we
know it and it is ours.

In these photos, the material is shot straight on, but can be deceiving. Raw
materials take on visual qualities of things that are not themselves. Pine
needle and bird shit recombine as a dove of peace. Its ingredients are
impossible to see. A tuft of weeds in a puddle looks like a milky yellow
sky behind the treetops, Vichyssoise, broccoli in Hollandaise. It takes
looking twice, three times and more. It takes an act of will and discipline
to see the raw material, what is really there, without being absorbed into
its appearance and composition. We finally see the bird shit. We figure it
out. A kind of slow motion cognitive twist, which, even once we've made it,
escapes us. We forget. The dove is perfect. The soup delicious. We rethink
it and look again. The mind knows better but can't help itself. We realize
in looking, as the image switches and turns, how easy it is to forget, how
pleasing it is to be fooled, and how difficult it actually can be to see the
reality of things as they are.