By Max Blagg, March 10, 2025
Our daily intake of photographic images arrives at such a persistently high volume that shards of beauty and intimacy and distant horror no longer pierce the discerning eyeball, they just flash by on the tiny screen of our omnipresent phones to be instantly unremembered. How to contain the moment so that the moment itself is still alive and vibrating when you look at it?
Tinyvices.com was a celebratory, pre-social media gathering place from 2005 to 2011, for photographers and artists who shared the rapidly expanding image culture. It was a crucial meeting place for young photographers to promote their work and keep track of their peers. The advent of digital encouraged photographers to increase the quantity of their output, but quality always requires an acute editorial eye. Tinyvices founder and curator of this 20th anniversary show, Tim Barber, presided over a torrent of submissions from contributors entirely lacking the self-consciousness and manipulation that Instagram and other social media have since imposed.
With the generous amount of wall space supplied by The Hole, Barber demonstrated his skillset with a rapid-fire flow of the work of over 100 artists and photographers, lining the walls of the four variably sized interior spaces—one a projection room-- with a vibrant sequence of images. The inquiring viewer can pick and choose whatever individual shots stroke or stir or otherwise enervate his retina, connect the editorial dots, or simply bathe in the radiance of its entirety.
There are multiple stimulants to choose from: Balarama Heller's photographs of young Soviet soldiers in training, their listless resignation becoming malaise a few years later, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine would reduce those boys and thousands like them to heaps of shredded flesh. Across the room Thatcher Keats' American country scenes evoke a casual sexuality, the limber girl squatting by her reflection in the pond as powerful as any upstate Kali. Since our current reality is so pliable, Michael M. Koehler’s photo of a reclining horse, seemingly relaxing on its back rather than in noble equine pose, might cause the viewer soaked in the carnage of the daily news to first read this as casualty rather than comedy.
Barber's curatorial choices signal glimpses and echoes of their influencers, now elders of the tribe: Justine Kurland, Ryan McGinley (who's represented here by a lovely moonlit swim scene), and Ed Templeton. Shades of Nan Goldin's and Larry Clark's intimacy among peers is invoked, but there's a refreshing near absence of guns and overt drug abuse. Most of the people pictured here seem unafraid, bodies radiating sex and health and youth, tempered perhaps by an awareness of how treacherous social media has become. A few years ago, if someone took your picture you didn't expect to see your (misbehaving) self on social media hours later. Today's wild children look like they want to participate in the world, not out of it.
After twenty years of sorting and sizing and grouping thousands of images, Tim Barber's editorial eye is forensic, laser sharp, and for this 20th anniversary of the original Tinyvices he has honed a multitude of contrasting photographs (and a few well-chosen paintings) into a visually stimulating whole. Highly readable clusters of light and shade, movement, and stillness, hold the wall and also hold up to meticulous individual examination. As Barber remarked in a recent interview, 'the algorithms are getting too strong.... we want to look at things that humans chose, as opposed to machines.' His own photograph here from September 2001, a domestic interior with a woman on the phone, her babe in arms, and out the window, backlit by a perfect blue sky, the twin towers, fully engulfed in flame. On that day our comfortable world ended, and a harsh and brutal epoch began. The multiple wars and subsequent political derangement that followed have become increasingly apocalyptic. If art really can save us, then the makers of this resonant collection may help to beat against the tide of larceny and lies, malice and spite spewing from our current government's sewers.
Max Blagg is a writer and artist and founder of Shallow Books. An anti-memoir Get Well Soonis forthcoming.
CHRISTIAN PATTERSON
CHRISTINE OSINSKI
DASH SNOW
ELÍSABET DAVÍÕSDÓTTIR
MICHAEL M. KOEHLER
PETER SUTHERLAND