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At first glance, Pisciotta’s photographs appear banal and ephemeral. Yet there is something about these awkward images, with their high color saturation and disturbingly vertiginous angles, that demands a closer investigation. Pisciotta photographs his subjects–friends, family, and people he encounters on his travels–in the privacy of their homes. What draws the viewer in is precisely the intimate interplay of familiarity between the photographer and subject, which is subtly coded into the content of the images. Spectators suddenly find themselves voyeurs, self-consciously placed in the very spaces of the photographic composition.

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In Pisciotta’s photograph A Lone, Portland, Maine (1999), the depth of field is disturbingly ambiguous. The sense of overlap, which helps us determine spatial relations, seems to be off. The subject is positioned in the righthand corner, half-dressed, his torso exposed. His thin body blends into the high intensity colors of the printed fabric that surrounds him. In a strange case of figure-ground reversal, he exists on the same plane as the wolves that crowd the hanging fabric print in the background. He gazes into the camera through partly closed eyes, laughing distractedly while scratching his back. Next to the man, as if coming right out of his hip, is a nightstand with a naked bulb, an old-fashioned rotary phone, and a digital alarm clock. The crammed space of the photograph’s composition forces the viewer to feel a sense of tension and uneasiness. The photograph captures the irreconcilable experience of a private space opened to the public. Through his work, Pisciotta manages to communicate some of the structural principles at work between the photographic realm and real space. The peculiar sense of depth and awkward sense of intimacy add to the overall atmosphere that these photographs exude. This is what makes our position as viewers seem all the more precarious.

Different concerns guide the work of Rhode, who uses both single-channel video and photography to explore the passage of time. Inspired by early scientific experimentation in motion and anatomy, his pieces read like visual vignettes, capturing the brief instants of movement on video as well as in the photograph. Rhode’s work operates on the border between the photograph as a static document of time and the video as a record of action. In Rhode’s Stone Flag (2004), a photographic piece comprised of nine C-prints, we see an aerial view of a man dressed in white against a dark background of pavement. Although prone on the ground, the point of view implies he is standing up, waving a large flag. The flag, seemingly made out of shattered bricks, appears heavy and cumbersome. The man’s body language suggests a physical tension, as he struggles under the flag’s weight, waving it against the force of an imaginary gale. Similar to Eadweard Muybridge’s and Etienne-Jules Marey’s early experiments in motion photography, Rhode’s images read like the comic book strip: the temporal dimension is a product of visual conventions and the movement of the image is performed only in the viewers’ minds.

The work of Garaicoa documents the architectural spaces of the city. Delicately positioned needles and thread puncture these black-and-white photographs, creating hybrid images that map out a terrain of absence and ruin. His work is implausibly utopian because it speaks to an ideal landscape that no longer exists. With the use of the colored thread and pins, he creates a faint outline, a fragile delineation of memory. His compositions recall late nineteenth-century stereoscopic photographs, where the juxtaposition of two images created an illusionary sense of depth.