Michael Huey

Photography, as Susan Sontag pointed out, is an inherently melancholy art-form - the permanence of its images only serving to emphasize the temporality of its subjects. What, then, to make of American artist Michael Huey, whose work consists of taking various 'archival materials' - mainly old photographs - and simply re-photographing them on a bigger scale?

The results are certainly melancholic, yet at the same time oddly celebratory - unmoored images, their meanings lost to history, their surfaces scratched and mottled with age, which have unexpectedly been rescued from oblivion.

The works are mostly based on portraits or scenes: tinted images from the 1870s showing lugubrious, rustic types; a bizarre 1940s transparency of a uniformed bus driver digging a hole on a beach; a Victorian posed stereograph of city life. Entitled 'Story Problems', the exhibition revolves around the notion of ambiguous narratives, lost significance - though sometimes Huey rather tends to force the symbolism, as with his images of empty photo mounts.

Such evocations of absence seem superfluous - also somewhat disingenuous: rather than systemically addressing the archival sources of his material, Huey's selection mostly just reflects his own aesthetic preferences, for a certain flavour of oblique romance.

It's a shame, because when Huey does belatedly start to consider issues of categorisation and cataloguing, he ends up producing his most interesting works: monochrome interiors where every object is numbered and inventoried; and a child's star-diagrams of the night sky. These images seem to function as an analogy for photography as a whole - for its mournful attempt to corral a fragmentary reality, to attach significance to the arbitrary and incidental.