“Closed” is a series of images documenting empty commercial spaces in New York City. I have been struck by the nearly epidemic amount of vacant storefront spaces in our city, many of which remain empty for long periods of time. Income and wealth inequality has had an overwhelming impact upon our nation, especially upon the makeup, diversity, and uniqueness of our city. Having lived in New York for many years, I have watched as number of singular and vibrant institutions, businesses, restaurants, and bars have closed in excess of normal economic fluctuations and turnover. Additionally, these vacant spaces mirror the technological changes that have influenced the way in which we engage with the public sphere. As more social and commercial activity occurs within the digital realm, there is a changed relationship to physical locations.

In photographing these spaces, I’ve been struck by both the repetition and variation of their appearance, while coming to see the subtleties in coloration and formalistic elements in what appear at first glance to be bare and utilitarian spaces. Often, residual elements suggest what once occupied or thrived here before either shuttering or moving on.
I find it appealing to use the act of photographing as a way of forcing attention to moments and elements in our world that are often overlooked, or at best given short shrift. Even vulgarity can allude to humor or pathos with the correct engagement via visual language. The formalistic nature of the utilitarian can likewise do the same when it is changed by virtue of its context, or through its environment acting upon it.

Small Images

I am interested in the poetic capacity of the incidental interactions between overlooked or discarded elements within our environments. The evidence we leave through the activity of our lives shapes the spaces we inhabit. The marks we make in our passing, the detritus of our interactions with each other, the strange vitality of unrelated elements encountered unexpectedly, all of these create an aggregate sensation and inference about larger experiences.

From a biographical standpoint, as a gay man who grew up in fraught and overbearing environments, I’ve developed a keen sense of seeing and looking via oblique angles out of an internalized need for safety. Although personal and social evolution has made that less necessary on a daily basis, it informed my sense of seeking out the overlooked and unseen evidence of the world. It’s my desire to emphasize that, even in the marginalized state of what I find, the sense of harmony, uplift, and insight is still present and can be profound.

All of these images are photographed without premeditated arrangement. I’ve collected them over the course of many years through my living and daily movement in New York. These moments act as evidence for broader ideas about the nature of social and interpersonal interaction, as well as concepts of community, and my concerns around our collective ecological impact.

The Male Orgasm

This series of photographs confront the viewer with the idea of sexuality and its representation, how sexuality and representation of  sexual activity can act as a sign.

How are items and images sexualized? How do images or objects which suggest sexuality operate differently than those things which directly depict a sexual act? In the differences between the two we are confronted with our own psychological responses to the sexualizing of imagery.

These images are based upon analog materials- VHS tapes viewed through a cathode ray television, separating them conceptually from the contemporary speed of digital media- the internet, smart phone, and smart phone app.

The images are removed from reality by degrees- the viewer understands these images as a projection and therefore, as a fantasy. The television makes the viewer aware of the camera, and therefore reinforces concepts of the sign. This understanding takes the images further from reality. We understand as viewers that the images were not created during any physical interaction, and therefore create many barriers between the viewer- the artist, the intermediary of media and film crew, the subject matter, and the absent subject. In this respect, these images can rightly be viewed as images of absences.

Pornographic material and imagery engages not only the direct nature of sexual fantasy, but also the fantasy of timelessness. Images captured and replayed will never age, nor will their subjects change. This adds another layer of the fantastic which separates it from reality. These images engage the concept of the male gaze, but invert it in some ways and turn it back upon itself through and by the homosexual male gaze. I am also engaging the tendency toward the elevation of the fantastic in sexualized and eroticized depictions within the gay community.

The uniformity of much of these images relates to the uniformity of experience vis a vis the engagement of similar material that is by its nature often solitary. The repetition and variation of imagery creates a similar visual experience, the variables of which are the subject.

In creating this body of work, I was surprised to discover the range of emotional implications of the various still images. Certainly eroticism was the paramount feeling, but I also discovered that there were images which were absurd and humorous, grotesque, painful, indifferent, and a few which suggested fear, guilt, or pathos.

Through the omission of more graphic imagery and detail, perhaps the potency of the expressive capacity of these images and their subjects is enhanced. By divorcing these images from their context we are able to make new associations about their meaning.

Dominic Quintana