The subtitle to the first part of John Gossage’s remarkable two-for-one photo volume The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon is simply “Some photographs by John Gossage.” The sentiment serves the photographer’s modest visuals, as his images frequently seem uneventful and even boring (if not quite in the vein of Boring Postcards, a theme well-mined by his friend and fellow photographer Martin Parr). But like the films of Ozu, there is a quiet intensity to the Gossage vision that rewards patient and open eyes.
The work in The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler was born shortly after September 12, 2001, the day Gossage became aware that then-Secretery of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was his Kalorama neighbor. Gossage talked to the Washington City Paper about this discovery in an article titled, "The Devil in Kalorama," but the resulting monograph steers clear of the sensationalism that title would promise. Steidl is one of the premier publishers of art monographs, and this is a handsomely produced title, brilliantly designed in ways that go beyond the fine printing. Cryptic color bands mark off sections of images, and the dust jacket is ingeniously reversible, each side printed with a cover for the corresponding section of the book. The images themselves are of ordinary things: trash, flyers, security system signposts, a car parked with The Club dutifully installed in the steering column.
What draws the alert student of photography into these pictures is not necessarily the banal content or straight-ahead composition, fine as these are: pay attention to Gossage’s use of depth of field. The first images in the book have the foreground in focus, as you’d expect it to be; but several pages in something subtle shifts: a photograph made over the shrubbery line through a series of ground-floor windows. Here, the foreground is slightly out of focus while a set of windows on the other side of the house are the object of focus. Photography may have voyeurism at its basis, but this change in focus is a cinematic suggestion of something more: surveillance, pursuit, as if the lens were following something that had just escaped it. Another photograph, a long-shot of one of the more modest homes in the neighborhood, eschews focus entirely. The accumulation of such details in context do not not hit over your head as a jeremiad on national paranoia, but are presented matter-of-factly with the artist’s signature gimlet eye.
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