Clarity Without Shape

Solomon finds a paradoxical beauty in the collapse of the natural, and the decay of the industrial. His photographs are a tribute to a world in flux, where the potential for growth and resilience lies in the rubble.

Solomon’s Clarity Without Shape narrates the half-lived and the half-imagined. Photographed from 2019 to the present day, these images were produced while in transit across various state lines. Selected from Solomon’s personal photo archive, this collection spins disparate events into atmospheric union. 

In Clarity Without Shape, otherwise anonymous scenes are peopled by questions. The flipped car, bent light, and smoldering branches enchant the landscape with a curious and blissful estrangement from reality. The events appear re-staged but still unscripted. With time and feeling out of scale, reality is a piecemeal construction, similar to a fond but distant memory. Chaining together past events into a knowable shape–with their associated relationships and affective states–happens by means of deliberacy, care, and deceptive confidence in how things once were. Solomon’s images are textured by a similar pattern: a criss-crossed network of what it really felt like, what we think might have happened, and a blurred understanding of how things came to be.

Behind their elegant composition, the photographs are rife with collisions. There is nothing inevitable about the crash: the cause and consequence are out of frame, but the evidence remains. Solomon’s images excavate our emotional territories to make sense of the event. As we confront a world that is always already happening, we engage Clarity Without Shape with an investigative eye. Soaking in the tender atmosphere as it ripples through the images, we cast our gaze upwards and inwards. The visual axis turns counter-clockwise as we refuse to make use of history, forget about the future, and wonder what happened between here and there.