Christopher Williams at David Zwirner - photography exhibition

This discursive survey represented Christopher Williams's idea-based photographic production in two series of works, through the lens of his politically charged "Angola to Vietnam*" series (1989) and in the broader embrace of an ongoing series called "For Example: Die Welt ist schon" (The World Is Beautiful). Williams's "Angola to Vietnam*" (the asterisk refers to the much longer full title of this series, published in a book at its inception) is a series of black-and-white photographs, each of which stands for a country that has practiced "disappearance" as a means of subjugation. Williams applied a list of such countries to an inventory of blown-glass botanical specimens in the storage vaults of the Botanical Museum at Harvard University. The 27 models of flowers indigenous to the countries on his list were then photographed at his direction, matted, framed and presented with labels indicating country of origin as title, followed by model number, genus and family, and common name, when available. Like votive candles in a chapel, these straightforward images memorialize the disappeared, casting new light on the uses of representation as a means of witness.

For the second part of this rigorous exhibition, Williams selected work from his "For Example: Die Welt ist schon," begun in 1993, including groups of related images and other disparate ones. The project is based on Albert Renger-Patzsch's modernist photographic essay, Die Welt ist schon (1928), misunderstood by a public seduced by its misleading title. Renger-Patzsch's book of photographs actually proposed an objective way of thinking about and recording ordinary things, anticipating by 50 years photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and Robert Adams, who were associated with the "new topographics," a kind of photography devoted to the documentary image rather than to formalist concerns.

Among selections from "For Example," Williams presented a color photograph inclusively titled E.A. (Billy) Hankins III, M.D. Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, Chief Preparator Wildlife Displays World Museum of Natural History, Loma Linda University (La Sierra University), Riverside, California, Huntington Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, August 3, 1999 (1999). In this straightforward image, Hankins observes the blooming of the so-called corpse plant, the world's largest and foulest-smelling flower, a short-lived blossom native to the rain forests of Sri Lanka (a country also represented in "Angola to Vietnam*").

The "For Example" section of the exhibition also included the astonishingly icy Erratum (2000), a vivid, large-format contact print of a dishwashing machine in oversaturated color and black-and-white. Williams installed it in the midst of seven black-and-white prints, also part of the "For Example" series, that document his pilgrimage to Grande Dixence, Val de Dix, Switzerland (1993). In homage to a master of modern cinema, he traveled to the location of Jean-Luc Godard's first film, Operation Beton, which itself documented the building of the Grande Dixence Dam in 1954. However unexplained his systems of reference in the immediate gallery context, Williams's images resonate with the contingency and complexity of the human condition, and they are, beautiful.

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