MARGET
LONG
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
MARGET
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
Mathew Brady’s Skylight, 2009-2011
-Elaine Freedgood, New York University
In 2009, Long gained access to a vacant building on lower Broadway that once housed Mathew Brady’s daguerreotype studio in the mid-1850s. Known for both his Civil War photographs and his portraits, Brady was among the most influential image-makers of his generation. Inside this five-story industrial building, he and his team of “operators” photographed presidents, senators, and ordinary citizens—many encountering photography for the first time.
For Long, history and its documentation pose representational problems that become most acute when the subject is the very site of photographic production. Beneath Brady’s skylight, bodies were transformed into hand-held ghosts: with light, silver, and mercury vapors, people were reconstituted as flickering images on a metal plate. Even in this most material of photographic forms, the image is an act of dematerialization—its substances volatile, its surfaces unstable. The same could be said of the material of history itself.
All of Long’s work in and after the building asks what, if anything, one feels when visiting a “historic” site. If that site once served as a public photographic space, how does it shape that feeling? What remains to be visited when the architecture of representation itself has vanished? And where, precisely, are we trying to go when we try to return?