Recently, there were two exceptional exhibitions of large photographs in New York. While their scale alone was arresting, there was certainly more to these images than the concept of "bigger is better." The tremendous presence of these two groups of pictures-Walker Evans murals at Andrea Rosen Gallery and heads by Philip-Lorca diCorcia at Pace Wildenstein, Chelsea-had a big impact, each in its own way related to scale: in Evans' case, due to its subversion of photographic transparency; and in diCorcia's, due to its captivating reconstruction of social vision.

The Evans exhibition, on view from September 4 through October 27, 2001, consisted of five mural-sized prints, each measuring approximately six-by-eight feet. Mounted on Masonite, these gelatin silver prints were among thirteen that Evans printed at this scale for his 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Each large panel has been assembled from two complementary halves that together form a kind of photographic diptych. Their mounting in this exhibit reveals six screw holes in each panel--twelve for each image--used during their installation as backdrops in 1971. The bared white edges of the Masonite, scratched and marred in some places, make it possible to see where the Masonite stops and the photograph begins. Together, the exposed screw holes and edges suggest these panels' contemporary status as artifacts of museum history. The project seems as determined to collapse the boundary between image and mount as it is to question the distinction between a photograph and the objects it records.

Each image Evans selected for this project is devoid of people, but human presence touches every aspect of what is photographed: from the bent fork tines in an Alabama sharecropper's shack to a hand-lettered shoe shine advertisement; from the outside of identical houses behind a wall of movie billboards (the most prominent one featuring a battered Carole Lombard) to the delicately embroidered pillow on a shrimp fisherman's bed. Such unpeopled images are not unusual in Evans' oeuvre, but humans' consistent absence here suggests careful selection by Evans himself (or the curator, John Szarkowski). But what else makes this group of pictures cohere?

Each photograph has a strong physicality: the stained and strained slats of wood to which a silverware rack is tacked; the smooth walls hung with religious images; the peeling paint on a dormant billboard. Each photograph depicts either wood or board, virtually doubling its physicality. The wit of a photograph of a billboard (however run-down) being itself turned into a billboard is obvious, but perhaps more important is its ability to erase the line so often drawn between art and artifact, creative masterpiece and everyday object. This is not to say that Evans does not have the skill of an art photographer; he does. With these photographs, he has transformed would-be art photographs into something far more complex: neither simply art nor mere object.

This accomplishment may go a long way toward explaining the impact of those empty screw holes on the surface of the panels. One wonders why Evans (never the art photographer envisioned by Alfred Stieglitz) would have printed such magnificently large photographs only to bore holes in them. But these holes are the only feature disturbing the transparency of these images as photographs, a characteristic of the medium we frequently overlook. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida: "Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see." 1 This informs the statement, "It's such-and-such," as opposed to, "It's a photograph of such-and-such." It is perhaps an even easier slip of the tongue-and mind-to do this when a photograph is large and its content may be life-sized. It would be easy to do this before Evans' pictures, if not for these holes. Nowhere are we so lulled into easy looking than with Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead (1936). A quick glance might register these holes as a few more nails in the kitchen wall itself. The physicality of these panels and the holes in them make certain that we remember that these holes are not nails any more than this photograph is a kitchen wall.

A different, yet equally certain, reminder is manifest in Philip-Lorca diCorcia's most recent work, heads (1999-2001). In these seventeen color photographs--measuring four-by-five feet--diCorcia has captured some happenstance pedestrians in Times Square, with the help of a radio signal, a strobe light, and some twenty feet of distance. With the photographer and his camera positioned well out of view, the radio signal prompted a strobe concealed in scaffolding that isolated unsuspecting passersby in a lit instant. The effect is remarkable: a well-lit figure or group emerges from such complete blackness into the glow of the strobe that it is almost inconceivable that diCorcia made these pictures at noon and not midnight. These people were singled out not only by diCorcia's light, but also by their membership in a group of seventeen printed from over four thousand photographed. 2 Approximately life-sized, diCorcia's subjects invite our inspection, a prolonged version of the unsolicited, studying looks doled out every day, on every city street. These are portraits of social vision itself.

Like other street photographs before them, DiCorcia's heads afford a more leisurely consideration of the persons pictured than everyday encounters can allow. According to Luc Sante, writing in the accompanying catalogue, diCorcia offers up a fiction, not the "unvarnished, unprocessed, and unpremeditated truth" of Walker Evans or Harry Callahan. 3 Yet, whatever "truth" might be gleaned from an Evans photograph of a subway rider or a Callahan of Chicago pedestrians is just as fictional. This fiction is of the sort we hastily compose as we walk down an avenue. Is it not, after all, the freedom to do this unabashedly that constitutes the irresistible lure of the street photograph? It is all the more ironic that our attraction to such photographs is predicated on a conviction that the camera is never pointed at us. To read a person, to construct her or his identity from a variety of what we take to be "signifiers" is to do nothing less than to draft a fiction. The privileged intimacy experienced before DiCorcia's heads indulges our urge to compose as we will. While a fair-haired teenage girl or a businessman might seem to embody a certain type, a certain "identity," the artist himself has said, "Most of the time, people… present themselves as clichés of what they should be." 4 Still, before these pictures, one encounters oneself reflected in the interminable blackness surrounding the figures. At this point comes the chilling reminder that it is our type, our character that has fashioned the entire fiction.

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