Tim Carpenter: Local Objects

Borrowing its title from the Wallace Stevens poem in which “little existed for him but the few things / for which a fresh name always occurred,” Local Objects presents a beautiful yet remarkably unassuming body of work by Brooklyn/central Illinois-–based photographer Tim Carpenter (born 1968): a calm, steady rhythm of 74 medium-format photographs made in the semirural American Midwest.

While each picture records the seemingly random non-activity of a typical street view, Carpenter’s meticulous composition and contemplative sequencing creates a harmony of natural and geometric motifs running quietly throughout the book, an interplay of minor chords that draws the viewer into this specific physical place (mostly central Illinois, where Carpenter grew up). Detached from the urgency of current affairs, stripped of all excess, the photographs reflect a poetic attempt to see “the thing in itself,” to make meaning with the barest tools possible.