The light hits differently in Los Angeles. They say it’s an effect of smog, as sunbeams refract through toxic gases and radiate lurid colors. Whatever the case, that light has brought countless artists to the Golden State. It cuts across many of David Gilbert’s photographs, captured as it glances through the window blinds of his LA home and studio. Sunset is a favored time for the way it paints things with a warming glow, like the cartoonishly bright, yellow paper stars in Solar System (2022) or the violet window pane in the aptly named Drama at Sunset (2013)—a moment of magic before the world goes dark.
Photographs are comprised of three essential elements—light, fixative, and ground, usually paper—which freeze-frame the ever-changing world in simplest matter. Since Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844), the medium has been understood as an index of loss. The simple stuff that Gilbert photographs isn’t meant to last: drawings and collages on paper that are usually destroyed by the time their image circulates. Instead, they’re preserved in the paper stock of his photographic prints. In Gilbert’s studio, the lens always comes last, even though it’s the first thing we see. “The camera is the glue that holds things in place,” he says. This recursive tendency is part of what makes his photographs more than they seem...
Evan Moffitt
