Begin with the small decal pressed to the rear side window of the little Fiat, a rectangle of paper no bigger than a matchbook, easy to miss beneath the billboard that towers over it. Once you notice it, the whole street reorganizes itself around the fact of things stuck to surfaces. For above the car, pasted to the shopfront, a campaign poster shouts VOTA EMILIO PUCCI, N.13, the couturier standing for the Liberal party under a little flag marked PLI.
Two kinds of adhesion, then, share one frame: the throwaway sticker and the civic poster, both printed matter fixed to walls and glass so that images may circulate and shape what people do. The joke is delicious. A name we associate with silk scarves and psychedelic prints here solicits votes, fashion migrating into politics by the same means it always travels, cheap ink, bold type, a face or a flag repeated until it feels like fact. The tiny sedan, dwarfed, roof rack empty, is the ordinary citizen the poster is addressing.
Winter’s gelatin silver print belongs to this economy of surfaces even as it stands apart from it. Where the poster will be torn down within weeks and the sticker will peel, the photograph fixes both in a permanent emulsion, granular and grey, that will outlast the election it records. The rusticated stone at right, the Leuci bulb signs in the window, the ajar engine lid at the car’s tail: all become equally durable. What was designed to be temporary has been made, by a chemistry of silver, to keep.
Begin with the small decal pressed to the rear side window of the little Fiat, a rectangle of paper no bigger than a matchbook, easy to miss beneath the billboard that towers over it. Once you notice it, the whole street reorganizes itself around the fact of things stuck to surfaces. For above the car, pasted to the shopfront, a campaign poster shouts VOTA EMILIO PUCCI, N.13, the couturier standing for the Liberal party under a little flag marked PLI.
Two kinds of adhesion, then, share one frame: the throwaway sticker and the civic poster, both printed matter fixed to walls and glass so that images may circulate and shape what people do. The joke is delicious. A name we associate with silk scarves and psychedelic prints here solicits votes, fashion migrating into politics by the same means it always travels, cheap ink, bold type, a face or a flag repeated until it feels like fact. The tiny sedan, dwarfed, roof rack empty, is the ordinary citizen the poster is addressing.
Winter’s gelatin silver print belongs to this economy of surfaces even as it stands apart from it. Where the poster will be torn down within weeks and the sticker will peel, the photograph fixes both in a permanent emulsion, granular and grey, that will outlast the election it records. The rusticated stone at right, the Leuci bulb signs in the window, the ajar engine lid at the car’s tail: all become equally durable. What was designed to be temporary has been made, by a chemistry of silver, to keep.