In its narrative arc, Endangered Species illustrates the miraculous possibilities offered by the camera. Moving from greater compositional detail to simpler, if no less rich, imagery, the book demonstrates how photographers can engage with, and then capture, quotidian reality and, through the photograph itself, show us something beyond. For me, photography is a marvelous riddle, a mode of representation that is compressed, yet ripe with meaning. As I have written elsewhere, what is central to photography is the act of transformation, the creation of something mysterious and uncanny from a momentary glimpse of time’s passing. Which is, of course, the base reality of existence: we are here now, but soon we will not be. In this regard, photography offers a means of consolation, a record of the artist’s effort at delaying the unspooling of our allotted hours. The ensuing pictures show us how the world, in all its wonder and glory, appears in a single sliver of time. To paraphrase what Tim Carpenter has eloquently noted in To Photograph is to Learn How to Die, photographs bring us achingly close to the true meaning of things, the awesome power of the ineffable. In so doing, they offer us, “an affirmation of life, the final yes.” In a word, “magic.”
In this respect, Endangered Species might be considered a telling illustration of the way photographic practice mimics the inexorable trajectory of life. The pictures were made in the District of Columbia metro region between March 2020 and April 2023, the extended window of social upheaval that was the Covid pandemic. They capture the Washington that visitors do not see, the city hidden by the monuments, the streets traversed by those forced to circumscribe their normal lives to the dictates of a foreign and seemingly inscrutable pathogen. This most recent plague, and our responses to it, raised innumerable questions, not the least important of which were: Who are we, why are we here, and how do we engage with other people and our environment? Although Endangered Species attempts to answer visually these metaphysical enigmas, which are, as suggested above, inherent in the act of photography itself, it goes further. The pictures should be understood as a metonymic exploration of a much larger existential truth: we all are individuals ensnared in the iridescent light and long shadow of Time. What could be more compelling than a once-in-a-century virus, and its catastrophic effects, to illustrate the close connection between photographic practice and life?
As those often sad months taught us once again, when night’s blackness stretches out beyond us into infinity, what will survive are the fleeting moments, the passing looks, the chance encounters, and the uncanny revelations of reflected light lost to heaven’s sight but captured for eternity in the camera’s warm and forgiving eye. No genre of picture making is more suitable for the raw display of human ephemerality, and its greater truth, than street photography: How the world appears, at least for a brief glance and fraction of a second, as a picture, a creation of man. The sadness and anomie of those days remain palpable in these photographs, yet so does the sly humor created by the odd juxtaposition of people, pictures, and words. The way refracted light reveals meaning, both high and low. Covid has become, as many predicted years ago, a chronic, if not catastrophic, medical concern, one that will nag humans for eternity. (I am, in fact, in the midst of my first infection, even as I write.) But, beyond Sars-CoV-2, we must not forget the greater and more immutable truth: the dark and eternal abyss stares at us all, waiting patiently for the glance back.
You can purchase a copy of Marks’ book, “Endangered Species” here.
