Alex Mctigue

The space between is where photography works, absence is the site of desire. Of the Night, By the City looks to found language embedded within the streets of New York City as a site of overlap between the past and the present.

This book consists of 36 gelatin silver contact prints, made by using a cast from a single New York City sidewalk. To make this work I created a one-to-one indexical impression using a transparent urethane silicone mold. The mold becomes a negative in and of itself. Bringing this negative into the darkroom, the larger singular image is exposed and fragmented according to industry standard paper sizes. This found language suspended in the sidewalk is a codex of the city. Through the photographic reliance on both time and perspective, memory’s image is dissected, skewed and re-ordered. Some call this the language of the night, others simply find a presence in the absence.

This book was made during The 2021 MUUS Collection / Penumbra Foundation Risograph Print & Publication Residency.