Between Seeing and Believing: A Studio Visit with Daniel Gordon

Daniel Gordon: Color Light Studies has been extended through July 25, viewable online and by appointment. Ahead of the installation, Gordon invited photographer Lucas Blalock to his Brooklyn studio to discuss his latest body of work. The longtime friends reflect on Gordon’s working process, how his investigation of transparency, light and shadow has changed his approach to color and composition, and the tensions haunting photography today.

Lucas Blalock: Your newest work seems to be a return to working through more explicitly photographic problems. Does that sound right? Can you talk about how you arrived here?

Daniel Gordon: First, it feels like we’ve been talking through our work—and through our friendship—for twenty years, so it’s really meaningful to have this conversation together. The days of smoking together outside of the darkroom at Bard are a part of my core memories—my sense of being a part of a community. I think we share a lot of specific concerns around photography as a constructed fiction and its ability to connect to other mediums. I’m so grateful we’re in this strange little cohort together.

To your question, that’s a fair read. For the last decade my practice tilted toward an almost painterly relationship with photography: I was building brightly colored paper constructions and photographing those sculptural tableaux. I was trying to achieve perfectly-even illumination—flattening every object so no single light source could be detected. Almost as if the picture were lit from everywhere and nowhere at once so that color could be the main subject. Recently, I realized I wanted to wrestle with more core optical questions—things like directional luminosity, transparency, and the play between object and image.

Around the end of 2024 I decided to make a shift to working in black and white—which is something I had never done. I tend to set assignments for myself in order to discover new ideas and ways of making images. I began setting up very small still lifes—glassware, scissors, cutlery, and other every-day objects found around the house and studio. Once I stripped the scene down and took color away, I rediscovered how much freight black and white can carry. In grayscale, a shadow isn’t decorative; it’s existential. That reminded me of the work of André Kertész and Josef Sudek—the way early modernist photographers treated light as both an objective recorder and a source of abstraction.

From there each arrangement becomes a feedback loop between seeing and believing: the camera confirms and unravels in the same gesture. Returning to these explicitly photographic problems felt less nostalgic than necessary. It foregrounds perception itself, asking the viewer to decide how much of an image is received and how much is inferred.

Each arrangement becomes a feedback loop between seeing and believing: the camera confirms and unravels in the same gesture….It foregrounds perception itself.

LB: I have always thought about your work as materializing the terms of a mediated experience. And I definitely relate to how the changes in the medium over the last twenty years have made the scenario of photography and its relationship to the world seem more elaborate and open-ended. But your pictures make clear to me that questions of depiction and automaticity, which have been with the medium since its invention, still carry the lion’s share of its existential qualities. As a viewer, looking at photographs remains an experience of trying to understand the world via the strict terms of the photographic picture—its flatness, its stillness. That experience becomes a kind of game or ruse when the objects you photograph are themselves depictions of actual things. I know this process is kind of old hat in your practice but the near-naturalism in these, and the loosening of a proscenium view in the picture-making, seem to me even more important than the choice to work in black and white.

DG: That’s right, Lucas. The objects in these still lifes really are double agents: on one level they’re humble household things—a pair of scissors, a spoon, a bent drinking straw—but on another they’re images of those things, fabricated in foam core, paper, and ink. So when the camera looks at them, it’s depicting a depiction. That back-and-forth loop has always interested me, but in the past I staged it behind a kind of theatrical straight-on vantage point: the tableaux were frontal and evenly lit, almost like props on a mini stage.

With the new work I wanted to open up the sides of the stage. Some objects now tilt forward or drift out of plane; the camera hovers closer, sometimes even crops the “floor.” That looseness lets the viewer’s eye wander in a way that feels more immersive. You still confront photography’s flat, still surface—the classic “strict terms” you mention—but the cues are less clear. A paper fork casts a shadow that looks too weighty for paper; a glass throws a shadow and a reflection simultaneously because its printed twin is glued just behind it. Your perceptual understanding keeps flipping: Is that a real edge or a photographic one? Did the camera invent that highlight or did the artist?

Black-and-white helps, it strips away the distraction of hue and makes every tonal decision feel monumental. By loosening the vantage point, the photograph behaves less like a sealed diagram and more like an unsettled proposition. Those nineteenth-century questions of the photograph as a deliberate composition versus the photograph as an objective, machine-made record you reference are re-examined. Even in our hyper-mediated present, a photograph can still hit you with the basic mystery of, how does this flat thing make me feel the heft of the world?

LB: Yes, that is beautifully put. But you’ve recently introduced color into the series.

DG: Yes—after almost a full year of working only in grayscale, I was curious how that knowledge would translate to color. A funny side effect of that long monochrome stretch is how many faithful replicas I ended up making—so many that they’ve started to infiltrate real life. I built two identical pairs of black paper “glasses” for a still life and then promptly misplaced my actual frames. Now, every few days, I spot one of the props and think I’ve found my missing glasses—only to remember they’re strictly ornamental, pure photographic decoys. That little bait-and-switch keeps me alert to how easily a copy can masquerade as the original, and it felt like a green-light moment: if the fakes can fool me in real space, maybe I’m ready to let color complicate them.

The shift back wasn’t a reversal; it was more like switching the work from mono to stereo. The tableaux stayed intimate, and the light remained neutral in color yet directional, behaving exactly as it had in grayscale. Now the printed props—along with their printed shadows and reflections—carry color-calibrated gradients that impersonate translucency, and the neutral light activates those prints just enough to make the scene feel convincing. Color becomes another variable in the equation: a pink hue from a colored glass tumbler on the blue tabletop nods to the light that filtered through the real glass when I first shot it—light that isn’t actually present in the paper stand-in you see now. I keep bouncing between color and grayscale; each pass informs the other, but the picture still has to hold its own no matter how it was made. Rebuilding the tableaux out of inkjet prints is kind of a way to see the objects with absolute clarity and arrange them so their forms speak louder than what they literally represent.

LB: I want to get into the nitty gritty of this a bit more—to unpack just what this effort looks like. In  your studio I see a foam armature depicting a water bottle with a photograph of a hand glued to the front. The photograph depicts the transparency of the bottle you’re modeling with a hand holding it from the back. And then taped to the rear of this 3D object are the two fingers of this hand as they wrap around the side of the bottle. It’s a hilarious and totally beguiling object, a perfect illusion but only if seen from a certain angle. I bring it up because, to a great extent, the wizardly labor of your pictures is really collapsed into the “common sense” shorthand we tend to employ when looking at a photograph. But in fact, if a viewer comes to accept that there is nothing transparent or even translucent in these pictures—only depictions of these states—they start to take on an entirely different character. 

DG: Maybe I should back up and talk about distortion as a tool of depiction. I photograph the real bowl or glass once, then drag that file into Photoshop and warp the image so the highlights and rim lines balloon outward—almost like a Mercator map where Greenland swells into a continent. It’s extreme, reminiscent of Kertész’s Distortions, yet here the warping isn’t surreal for its own sake; it points back to reality and allows a flat print to pass for actual glass. In Photoshop it looks ridiculous, but once I print, cut, and curve that sheet over a three-dimensional shell, everything snaps into place.

For me that trick explores where there is some tension haunting photography now: deepfake , AI image generators, CGI—none of these need a lens at all, yet they borrow their visual language from life. These photographs still arrive with the promise of mechanical witness, yet the process—capture, edit, print, re-photograph—turns that promise inside out. The camera starts as a recorder, but by the time the image comes back through the lens it’s closer to a rendering than documentation. The viewer senses both realities at once: the optical signals are convincing enough to read as real glass, yet the tiny rips, glue seams, and paper fibers around the rim are a giveaway, reminding the viewer it’s a handmade counterfeit. Those rough spots are what keep the illusion honest—just believable enough, but not sealed shut. It’s not about fooling anyone permanently; it’s about holding the viewer in that suspended moment where they realize transparency can be manufactured, and that “seeing through” in a photograph has always been half physics, half belief.

Inquire

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Daniel Gordon is known for photography and sculpture that employs appropriation and reproduction in order to question the nature of the image-object relationship. Gordon holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Yale School of Art. He has exhibited at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston; Foam Museum, Amsterdam; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA P.S.1, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and elsewhere. His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and other museums. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Lucas Blalock is a photographer, Assistant Professor at Bard College, the author of Why Musty the Mounted Messenger Be Mounted?, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow based in Brooklyn, New York. He makes darkly comic photographs that probe discomfiting corners of the psyche while making a bawdy mess of staid photographic norms. His pictures are purposely awkward, ham-fisted, and jury-rigged. They are constructed with software that normally fades into the background, but which he thrusts center stage. Anyone with a rudimentary working knowledge of Photoshop can understand the methods Blalock employs—a jittery fuzz of clone stamping here, an irregular bit of masking there. Indeed, these are not the tricks he has up his sleeve. And this feeling that we can see the gears of the image turning is part of Blalock’s program.

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Artwork © Daniel Gordon. Photography by Charlie Rubin.

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