The Paris Review - Fall 2016

Santa Monica Pier, 1979.
temporalities. Across his projects, I experience the contradictory sense that
the human figure is just about to reenter the picture and that the architecture
and furniture will never again be occupied. Of course, this shifting
sense of presence and absence isn’t an effect merely of what’s depicted, but
of how: Bartos’s images feel both perfectly composed and simply found, patterned
and yet unmanipulated, which means that my awareness of someone
“ behind” the camera dims and intensifies and dims again as I look.
The architecture dreams, the chairs expect—on a variety of scales, Bartos
can reveal how collective fantasies about the future are sedimented in materials.
A few people do appear in Boulevard (2005), for instance, a book that
juxtaposes images of Los Angeles and Paris—two historical centers of image
making—but the pathos belongs to objects. Parked cars in an empty lot in
Los Angeles and an unoccupied table for two at a Parisian restaurant (shot
through the window from the street, but at an angle from which the photographer
is not reflected in the glass, adding to the sense the image was taken
by a ghost) seem to “wait without hope”—to quote Eliot, whom Marker
loved—for drivers and diners. The sense of waiting in Bartos’s work is key:
What appears, appears to wait for the return of the human, but since nothing
is as human as waiting, as the experience of duration that is boredom, I
begin to invest things with feelings. And then the things look back at me.
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