When first encountering Josh Brand’s modestly scaled photographs, it’s easy to get caught up in questions about facture: One wonders just how their arresting depths and subtleties of hue and contrast are achieved. For, along with contemporaries like Liz Deschenes, Markus Amm, Eileen Quinlan, and Wolfgang Tillmans, Brand employs a repertoire of sleight-of-hand analog procedures and effects. He embraces darkroom techniques and color printing processes now shadowed by advances in digital photography—recalling a shift in the 1990s that saw artists return to 16mm film for its physical properties and formal differences from high definition video. And yet he adopts these arcane techniques in order to reinvent them, to explore the seemingly counterintuitive pairing of abstraction and photographic means.

After studying film and photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, Brand moved to New York in 2003, where he found employment as a commercial printer in different custom labs (one of which, incidentally, went out of business this past year). Quietly appropriating his workplace as an after-hours studio for extemporaneous darkroom “sessions,” Brand began to experiment with simple gestures and an open-ended mode of composition—indebted to his interest in musical collaboration—to develop a body of work that cuts against the serial and documentary grain of conventional photography.

Many of Brand’s unique images—nearly all untitled—are made quickly and without a camera by simply blocking out parts of a photosensitive surface underneath brief exposures

of light. Often implementing items near at hand—a box, a piece of cardboard or paper—Brand renders planes and strata according to the relation of the intermediary thing to the light source, holding materials close to the surface to create a precipitous hard edge or suspending an object to create a hovering gradation of shadow and perceived depth. Evincing an aesthetic of performative immediacy and tabletop dexterity, this trajectory of Brand’s output is multifarious, allusive, and playful: A modernist grid is conjured by a red-on-white pattern, yet any rigidity is canceled by a semi-transparent glow; a contour of light ripples through perforated paper in blind mimicry of an aleatoric Hans Arp collage; a simple two-step exposure outlines a pastel purple and blue pattern of the kind of architectonic shape one might find in a Josef Albers color test; four slash marks cleave the monochromatic black of an exposed sheet of photo paper in homage to Lucio Fontana, avowing the gestural mark making at the foundation of Brand’s practice; and a dumb pear shape wryly invokes figure and ground with economy and ease.

Complicating the immediacy of his gestural maneuvers, however, another strain of Brand’s work leans toward a kind of elaborate shadow play, wherein layered patinas and competing geometries evoke a contingent return to the surface over time. In these works, spatial positions are far less stable and perceptual ambiguities multiply. For example, faint shades of green, pink, and red appear to have accrued in one image as occasional scratches or spots, blotting the background, while an incomplete rhomboid tilts away from the viewer. Offset by intersecting lines that triangulate to pull the composition vertiginously upward, afterimage-like impressions contrast with crisp delineation.

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