This Exhibit is Closed.

Philip Ringler

2023

Foreword by DeWitt Cheng 

Art Critic, Writer, Curator

San Francisco, CA

In today’s image-saturated culture, with billions of pictures uploaded and consumed everyday online, it is easy to dismiss the importance of the creative eye. Photography has always suffered under the popular misapprehension that anyone could take a picture, and Kodak would do the rest. With Artificial Intelligence joining Photoshop among the tools newly available, it is likely that the magical nature of photography, of images blooming on white sheets of paper in trays of developer beneath red dark lights, will include the computer and the network. Let us hope that the new tools afforded by digital technology will expand human creativity rather than replace it.

The conceptual photographs of Philip Ringler, a Californian who lived in China for several years and now lives and works in Florida, embody the contemporary worldview of fine art photographers in the digital age. His eclectic oeuvre draws on a host of  influences ranging from the Surrealists- Max Ernst and Rene’ Magritte, conceptual photographers-Duane Michals and Clarence John Laughlin, to the wry constructed documentary style of Larry Sultan, and Josh Mandel, who found humor and irony in straight photographs made by industrial photographers. 

Ringler’s work melds curiosity about his surroundings with a transformative vision: the quotidian is revealed as humorous, mysterious, ironic and complexly beautiful. Ringler takes from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation: a consciousness that culture, increasingly global and ubiquitous, has replaced nature as the locus of truth and reality, which have disappeared from the scene like some ancient gods, silenced by defeat and conquest. Instead of eternal realities, we deal with images and artifacts. Guy Debord’s phrase, the Society of Spectacle, dates from the 1960s, but it accurately predicts the current world of shamelessly fake news and performative fake outrage. “Baudrillard believed that society had become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society, that all meaning was becoming meaningless; he called this phenomenon the “precession of simulacra,” where images precede reality.

Ringler, instead of bewailing this chaos of contradictions, revels in it, sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously, combining his curiosity with what photographer Greg Mac Gregor calls “intelligent mischief.” Ringler states, “I create simulations (photographs) of the simulations in amusement parks, zoos, aquariums 

—places that are designed as self-contained, constructed realities.” 

Picasso once said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”