Untitled (grinding room in manufacturing plant) c. 1945

Robert Burian made this untitled gelatin silver print of a grinding room, but when? How? These questions feel less interesting than the way the photograph itself grinds away at our expectations. The inky darkness, the ghostly machinery, the endless repetition, everything is in reverse. This is a photographic negative, a way of seeing not the real thing, but the thing that comes before. Photography, like art, is about taking something real and making it... unreal. Take that stack of square containers to the left, so solid and grounded. In the negative, they seem to float, unmoored. And the darkness gives everything an equal weight, flattening space. Burian reminds us that the photograph is an object, a document, and an abstraction all at once. Like Sherrie Levine’s re-photographs, he prompts us to consider the nature of originality, and the value we place on the aura of the art object.