By Nathan Ely, June 10, 2025
Adam Fuss’s “Visual Resonance” is partially a subjective meditation of trauma and loss, and partially a rumination of photography’s nature. The exhibition is featured in the Buffalo AKG’s Hemicycle Gallery, through September 29th. Large scale panels featuring images of burnt clothing, crushed flowers, the silhouette of a stuffed toy rabbit, and a Tarkovsky poem, bracket the entrances at either side of the curved half rotunda at the center of the original 1905 building. The main wall contains three photographs; a seven-foot photogram of smoke flanked by two photographs of ash—— the burnt remains of Fuss’s personal documents, made in response to a frightening and difficult moment for Fuss following the abduction of his son, when he felt like burning the “paper skin” which marks our existence in the world. On the other side of the gallery, along the curved wall are photographs that span nearly 30 years of Fuss’s career, highlighting themes of nostalgia, loss, perception, time, and the uncanny. Much of the work is drawn from his ongoing projects “My Ghost” and “Theia”, the latter being a reference to the goddess of vision and light in Greek mythology.
Fuss expresses a recurrent interest in what he calls “a state of in-between”, saying:
“The ghost is, for me, not some external phenomenon but rather an emotional state or an unconscious state that acts as an intruder in the mundane or ordinary, frequently manifesting as the presence of an absence. The ghost is by nature neither fully physically and materially present nor completely nonexistent but in a state of ‘in between.’”
Fuss’s work draws on early photographic techniques which emphasize the objecthood of the photograph. Most photographs are the result of a specific kind of technology; an optical, mechanical, photo-electric/chemical recording of momentary space and time. Fuss maintains a more archaic idea of what constitutes a photograph, connecting with a much older, phenomenological relationship to the real.
Though he employs a variety of different processes, Fuss repeatedly makes use of the photogram - perhaps the simplest form of photography, it’s a cameralesstechnique wherein the subject is placed directly into contact with the photographic surface. In doing so, he not only reenacts the earliest photographic experiments, but also underscores the indexical promise of photography, the source of its epistemic power as well as its impact as memento mori.
Photograms, and by extension photographs, are indexes. The resulting image is directly connected to the object that produced it—like a handprint. The physical presence of the original resonates within the image. I believe this kind of presence, which by virtue of time will always become an absence, is the ghost which Fuss references.
Barthes wrote that all photographs contain “the decay of time.” Photography makes time’s passage tangible, a physical manifestation of the past intruding into the present. This idea feels central to Fuss’s work—the arrested motion of a ripple in water or birds in flight, photograms of children’s christening dresses, toys, burnt pajamas, crushed flowers, images of ash and smoke. His choice of subjects existsin a “state of in-between” and illustrate this state within photography. A photograph is uncannily familiar and unfamiliar, a shadow that is formed from part of the subject but will always be separate from it.
Several images from “Theia” (2022-2025), were made by pressing flowers into paper with a metal plate, sledgehammer and press, grinding their essence into it. They contain an undeniable presence, one that feels more authentic and closer than the kind of straight, detached image typically made with a camera. They are fixed in verisimilitude, perfectly reproduced as they were, but simultaneously unchanging, unmoving, void of smell and touch. They’ve become something else: a doppelganger of the real. The sense of loss Barthes felt upon looking at a childhood photograph of his mother, famously inspiring “Camera Lucida”, is also intrinsically felt when viewing a prehistoric handprint on a cave wall or a 19th century portrait; the flowers are gone and the image is all that remains—a ghost.
Nathan Ely is an artist and educator, and works as the Education Director at the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art (CEPA) in Buffalo, New York.
ADAM FUSS "Theia" 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
ADAM FUSS "Theia", 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
ADAM FUSS _Visual Resonance_ Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo by Brenda Bieger.