Riding along Kings Highway in Brooklyn, on the border between East Midwood and Marine Park, a neglected building stands out amongst the brown, grey, and beige houses that otherwise populate the street. Glossy black letters, embellished with faux gold outlines, are affixed onto the white vinyl siding that characterizes this structure, further differentiating it from the surrounding homes. The building is an outlier: loud, bold, and garish. It asserts both its presence and worth, not so much as a residential or commercial unit, but as some sort of landmark, here to direct both our eyes and our thoughts. Intrigued by the building’s intricacies, Daniel Terna approached the house over the course of three summer days. He framed it first in its entirety to then focus on the details—two small regal lions, a broken security camera, and the various textural surfaces on the façade. Photographed at high noon, dusk, and dawn, this series explores the metamorphic effects of light. With variated angles of view, degrees of close-up, focuses, and crops, Terna revives the desolate structure through poetic reinventions. And while photography, as Craig Owens famously stated, most often “represents our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image,” Terna’s photographs achieve just the opposite; they capture the transient nature of an inherently inert object. The passage of time is made palpable, both with the ever-changing light in the photographs themselves and the book’s calendrical format.
Opening with images shot midday and ending with some taken at daybreak, this series does not provide a typical beginning nor end, but creates a temporal loop in which both past and future are implied. A closer look at the photographs reveal a succession of small holes in the building’s siding, indicating that additional lettering once occupied its exterior. What did these letters spell out, one wonders. Why were they taken away? Will the remaining signage also be removed? What will this house look like, letter-less and bare? While exploring the visual possibilities that the building can offer, Terna’s photographs also imply previous and eventual narratives, suggesting not only what can be, but what was, and what could become.
– Laura Braverman, 2018
From Several Angles Over Several Days, Published by ROMAN NVMERALS, 2018
From Several Angles Over Several Days, by Laura Braverman, Still Magazine, November, 2017