Mostly People: Photographs by a German Immigrant in New York

Anyone who takes an interest in photography can't avoid asking, at some stage, the question: is the observer first aware of the content of the photograph or the medium itself? In other words: do we ignore the surface of the photograph in order to see, as it were, the content of the photo behind it; or do we remain aware, as Vilem Flusser stated, that technical images are not windows but images? In the case of Erika Stone's photographs, I am convinced that the eye is first led to the subject of the photograph, captured by the camera in a documentary style. This type of photography confirms Roland Barthes' theory of photography as pure contingency: "Whatever else a photo reveals to the eye and however it may be structured, it remains invisible: it is not the photo that one sees", rather the thing itself. This dualism, originating in the referential identity of the medium, is what makes working with photography so exciting, for the photograph always has to prove first what sort of image it wants to be. Erika Stone's photographs are not the subject of their own work, rather they appear as representatives of real life.