EMPTY SPACES: GHOST STORIES FROM A NEW AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
When I first met Mark nearly two years ago, he had just begun a photographic project documenting evacuated businesses in Tucson. He envisioned it as a document of the collapsing economic landscape. When he showed me the first photos and explained the project to me, I thought it was a tremendously pertinent project on so many levels - aesthetically, politically, historically. He eventually asked me to write the forward for his book when the project was complete.
Mark has finished the project and published a book of the photos. The project is called EMPTY SPACES and contains a stunning collection of photographs. It is a tremendous body of work that documents the collapse of the New American Frontier.
I did write the Forward for the book. It is probably the most comprehensive and inspired piece of art writing I have ever done. Following is an excerpt from my Forward and selected photographs from Mark’s book.
If you are interested in reading the entire Forward and seeing entire collection of photos, details for purchasing the book are located here on the EMPTY SPACES website.
All photos in this post by Mark Hahn
GHOST STORIES FROM A NEW AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
Excerpt from my Forward to EMPTY SPACES
Hahn’s photos don’t romanticize the ruins of some distant past. These are relics of recent history located in cheap functional spaces. These buildings and storefronts were created to serve one purpose - to provide a location for business transactions. The spaces in these photos are so generic and devoid of ornament that no specific evidence of the businesses they actually housed remains. They are anonymous skeletons of economic exchange standing dead in strip malls. Their names have been wiped clean from their surface, and their identifying details have been emptied along with the bank accounts that funded the failed dreams to which these empty spaces bear witness.
Hahn’s photos are not just landscapes without nature: they are portraits without people. The photographs of these buildings don’t just show the ravaged remnants of free trade found in architectural space, they also capture the vestiges of the dreams of economic prosperity left behind by the people who believed in a system that failed them. The ghostly reminders of human presence within the space of utter absence transform these photographs into images of transcendental beauty that document an era of overwhelming economic despair.
Although the spaces in these photos are filled with a tight system of forms and the empty terrain of what is missing, Hahn’s manipulation of the aesthetics of emptiness brings the places back to life. The tension between planes (a desk, a door, a counter, a floor), the play between shadow and light, and the trace evidence of human occupation within the photos (a cup, a chair, a phone line) activate the emptiness with an energy or aura that emanates from the smallest of details and the spaces between them. In a way, the spaces are activated by their own sense of deactivation. Hahn’s photographs are not just empty exercises in form and light. Because these “found” spaces were actually occupied by people who thought they could buy into the American dream, they can never be completely sanitized of their humanity. The images may represent a kind of void, but they did not come from a void.
Though the rooms and offices in Empty Spaces seem fixed in time and place, their fluctuating sense of scale adds another dimension of life to the images. Nature photographs of giant redwood trees or huge waterfalls often require the inclusion of human subjects in order to impress us with their size. But Hahn’s photographs impress us because their sense of scale is in flux. There is no point of reference other than the generic functionality of the space. They are simultaneously contained yet expansively wide open. These spaces could be huge or tiny. They are capable of communicating a sublime monumentality or the uncanny quality of the miniature. For all the uncertainty they stir up, however, the spaces present more like models of what life could have been rather than ruins of what life actually was.
Hahn’s manipulation of perspective and depth of field consciously accentuates this quality. Some shots are massive, showing the expansive void left behind by the economic collapse. The spaces open in their vast chambers like cathedrals, inviting the eye to roam through them. Light streaming in from outside reflects off windows, off floors, and off interior surfaces, and it fills the spaces with a transcendental glow. Instead of vaulted ceilings, we find dead sprinklers, drop ceiling panels, and fluorescent light tubes. Instead of stained glass windows, white light streams through unadorned aluminum framing. In these wide scale shots, we feel both the vacuum of the empty spaces but also a residue of spirit that transforms them into something beautiful and ethereal.
While the environments in these photos are sealed and finite and their final destination (closure and evacuation) has been determined, Hahn’s manipulation of shadow, light, doorways, and other structural elements within the photos instills the spaces with agitated uncertainty. Many of the photos dissolve in the background and at the edges. They disappear into shadow and a place of the unknown. Doors open into dark spaces that could either be a way out or could be a dead end. Exit signs lead to dark doorways, either beckoning us to step through into a new place of opportunity, or simply leading us into the dark abyss of recession. While objects and structures are brought into the light in the foreground, the background and edges of the photos disappear into shadow, as if the darkness is going to swallow them. Shadow itself is a living presence within the dead space. The dissipating shadows in some of the photos maintain some light and life, leading us off the edges into the unknown and giving a sense that that there is somewhere to go outside of these places of economic collapse. The shadows in other photos recede into a claustrophobic finality with a lone chair in a dark room swallowed in shadow, windows reflecting nothing but the opaque black of the dead space beyond, or corridors ending in the finality of a dark wall.
Even though we sense the existence of the outside world as light streams through windows or cracks of doors, it remains firmly situated beyond these closed spaces. The outside world comes to us filtered through a twice-removed process as trees, streetlamps, and clouds reflect off interior surfaces. These images hover within the interiors like projections from a world left behind, or they actually merge with the interior as if the exterior world has been superimposed on these spaces as a reflection mural. Yet they are glimpses into something beautiful, hope caught in the corner of the frame in the image of a lone street lamp or a billowing cloud. A red fire escape pull is fixed to the wall right next to an abstracted reflection of the outside world. The image is so beautiful, offering an escape from the rigid geometry of the sealed interior by leading us into the abstracted beauty of a myriad of reflections blending into color and light.
Life is found in other places in these photos as well if you look close enough. It’s almost like tracing the evidence and ephemera of the people who occupied the spaces and the transactions they conducted. Dead phone cords dangle like severed arteries from walls; the memory of human voices echoes in the disconnected lines. A bag of rubber bands sits on a desk waiting for someone to put it to use. The corner of an empty white board peeks from the side of one frame, as if it is waiting for a hand to lift a dry erase marker and write something on its blank surface. The empty board itself echoes with its own message saying, “People were here. Now they are gone. I am the keeper of memory.”
Even though the spaces may represent a failed body, life continues to pulse in the beautiful traces of light that illuminate each and every photograph. They make the photos transcend mere geometry and take us to a place that exists beyond calculations, economics, statistics, and history. These traces seep through the void left in the wake of economic collapse, providing moments of beauty and hope even in this seemingly empty environment. Hahn has captured a new American terrain where fallen dreams reflect off floors, windows, walls, ceiling panels, or piles of insulation tubing. Light filters through these spaces and illuminates an infinitude of tiny details and subtle variations in form and color. These fleeting moments of illumination allow the images to transcend the claustrophobic confines of their sealed environment and move beyond the system that closed the door on them. They show us that even in this empty landscape, we can find beauty in the most unexpected places if we just open our eyes and look.
The photographs in Empty Spaces are truly monuments of our time. By maintaining an austere minimalism and resisting the traditional approach to romanticizing ruins, Hahn communicates a beautiful and tender human presence through negative space, and he documents the ghostly absence that the new economy has left in its wake. This collection of photographs is not a romantic view of ruins, but a recognition that it is time to look at things differently, to take better note of the world we live in now and the people and dreams who occupy it. These photos open up a new realm of possibility in an era of economic collapse; they offer a way of seeing that allows us to find traces of beauty and humanity even when we find ourselves in a landscape of empty spaces.
--Kim Nicolini
