biography
matthew rabin thinks it's weird to refer to himself in the third person, so I won't. born in new jersey, I grew up in 1970's shreveport, louisiana; during what was likely the city's cultural golden age. or at least it seemed that way to me. I'm glad we moved there when we did and glad we left when we did. it the mid-80's. it was time.
I still miss that place, sometimes.
on more self-confident days, I like to think of myself as an autodidact; on those less so, a (reluctant) dilettante.
I once had my library card memorized and I converted to Judaism during the COVID pandemic.
artist statement
all art starts with the statement "I am showing you this." in interrogating each word, I work to keep my vision and intent clear and straight.
I see photographs as texts to be read; susceptible to both linguistic and literary devices. I'm thinking semiotics (more Peirce than Saussure) and the unreliable third-person narrator.
for the last 20 years I've shot--with some exceptions—in color. I prefer taking pictures of city and small-town landscapes peopled only by individuals in long-shot or shadow.
low-key squalor, the decay of man-made objects, pulls my gaze and speaks of people trying to and failing to (or struggling to, anyway) leave footprints. the unsuccessful attempt seems vulnerable and noble. I'm less interested in portraits, posed or otherwise. the camera is unreliable.
my subject, then, is the past—memory. though I'm still working through whether I think it's nostalgia; Proust's madeleine-induced precious fragments; or Walter Benjamin's messianic time (and here), and his closely related concept of empty, homogeneous time—as well as Kafka's treatment of the present and the future in The City Coat of Arms.
Judaism, with its focus on ritual and tradition’s primacy, is of a piece with memory, and—by extension—I'm interested in exploring how the Aggadah—Jewish folklore used to interpret the Talmud—can be employed as an aesthetic rather than exegetic strategy.
I build my best work around Roland Barthes' notion of the punctum. Small details, better seen on wall or laptop, rather than phone.
My formal preoccupations: fragmentary movement, people represented as archetypes rather than as individuals, aggressive cropping, and slightly destabilized space.
I borrow liberally. my work is influenced by Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and other essays); Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By; Barthes' Camera Lucida; Walker Evans' modernism and his American Photographs; Robert Frank's The Americans; William Klein's Life is Good and Good for You in New York; Alexei Brodovitch's Ballet; Stephen Shore's American Surfaces and Uncommon Spaces; the paintings of Edward Hopper; and the photography of Louis Faurer, Saul Leiter, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, William Christenberry, and---primarily---William Eggleston, from whom I steal shamelessly. as a poor copyist, hopefully my own voice emerges.
I like indecisive and indeterminate photographic moments. things seen briefly from the corner of the eye.
Representation
I do not have representation currently.