Author Amir Zaki's exhibition reviewed in the LA Times
Seductive estrangement
by Christopher Knight
Amir Zaki, “Built in 1872. Damaged in 1878, 1887, 1921, 1973, 1983, 1986, 1987. Renovated 1928, 1930,” 2021, archival photograph.
(Diane Rosenstein Gallery)
Pandemic disorientation is a surprising subtext of seductive new landscape photographs by Amir Zaki. Twenty-two color photographs at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, all made in 2021 as urban lockdowns and domestic quarantines were underway, show shoreline piers along the California coast. Although the occasional seabird does show up, the piers are unpopulated by human activity. Unpopulated, that is, except for the deft hand of the artist, who creates a subtle sense of estrangement.
They take a visual cue from the celebrated minimalist taxonomy of the late German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who systematically recorded water towers, blast furnaces, grain elevators and other industrial structures, or the California bungalows and dingbat apartments photographed by Judy Fiskin. It takes a bit of looking to realize that the large-scale, frontally composed pictures, most 2 feet wide and 2.5 feet high, aren’t what they at first appear to be.
Each colorful landscape image is cut in half by a wide band that goes edge to edge — what appears to be the blunt end of the pier. Top and bottom seem to go together, mostly because we casually assume that a camera’s lens captures a transparent view of an actual scene. Here, however, something appears to be quietly out of whack.