Douglas Huebler
[Photographer and artist, b. 1924, Ann Arbor, Michigan, d. 1997, Truro, Massachusetts.]
What has interested me all along is not the pronouncement of meaning but pointing toward the way meaning is formed.
The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.
Throughout the artist’s lifetime he will photographically document, to the extent of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive.
(Proposal)
I set up a system, and the system can catch part of what is happening in the world—what’s going on in the world—an appearance in the world, and suspend that appearance itself from being important…. The work is about the system.
I use the camera as a “dumb” copying device that only serves to document whatever phenomenon appears before it through the conditions set by a system. No “esthetic” choices are possible. Other people often make the photographs. It makes no difference.
Every photograph is a realization of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera. The number of such possibilities is large, but it is nevertheless finite. It is the sum of all those photographs that can be taken by a camera.
I’ve spoken seriously, and I am very serious, but you know an awful lot of the work is meant to twist things to the point of almost absurdity. I don’t want to celebrate absurdity, but I do mean to challenge a lot of premises.
The map is only a chart, you know. It isn’t really a real thing, and yet we begin to assume it is a real thing, Most people experience maps or clocks or charts or so forth as very real life-defining phenomena, or whatever.