This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 17, 2011 - Ryan Thayer's "Timemachines" at PSTL Gallery is a brilliant meditation on time and the image. Thayer has produced eight photograms, or unique cameraless pictures made by placing objects directly onto light-sensitized paper. The objects depicted are image-makers themselves, but of the digital variety: a camera, an ipod, cell phones, a computer.
In the photograms these devices appear as ghostly, reverse-tone images, floating in black voids. And they set up a curious relay between digital and analogue imaging techniques, as well as issues of uniqueness and multiplicity, and the archaic and the contemporary.
They also serve as reminders of how closely images are related to time: the digital devices can operate in "real time" but their images are fleeting and immaterial, while the photograms translate singular moments into more lasting material form.
Thayer, who is based in St. Louis and Berlin, has performed a simple gesture that cuts through the giddy fascination engendered by digital technology and grounds it in photography's historical genealogy.
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.