Fotografías

A darkened carnival cosmos, photographed at the edge of legibility.

Fotografías gathers 92 black-and-white photographs of the garish fantasy scenes Peter Fischli and David Weiss found painted on fairground attractions: shooting galleries, ghost trains, carousel panels and motorcycle fuel tanks, collected over years of travel through Switzerland and abroad. Shot on black-and-white slide film deliberately underexposed by two to three stops and printed at snapshot size, the pictures subdue their kitsch sources into murky, haunting nocturnes. Romantic sunsets, mystical mountains, wild boars, clowns and doe-eyed girls become small, dark, emotionally charged icons. The book, published by Walther König to accompany the 2005 exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, carries no text beyond its title page, letting the sequence of images do all the work.

Fischli and Weiss collaborated from 1979 until Weiss's death in 2012, building a body of work, from the film The Way Things Go to the encyclopedic Visible World, that dignifies the overlooked and levels the distinction between high and low art, a project surveyed in the Guggenheim's 2016 retrospective How to Work Better. Fotografías is among their most distilled statements: vernacular painting remade as fine art through nothing more than exposure and scale.