A forest clearing stands ajar and leaf litter morphs into indoor-outdoor carpeting in this puzzle picture. The plates in Richard Gordon’s 1976 monograph, Meta Photographs, explore the unintended uncanniness of photo-based decor and advertising. Gordon saw that the photographic prop—an inescapable presence in postwar public space—had come to shape the optical experience of city-dwellers as pervasively as plate glass and gaslight had done for their ancestors a century before.
Richard Gordon (1945–2012), North Beach, San Francisco, 1976. Gelatin silver print. Purchase, Photography Acquisition Fund. 2017.372.
© Estate of Richard Gordon