Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
I like to write about photography in this column because I don’t always get the chance to see these shows in person, and photography is relatively easy to consume virtually. But it’s also among my favorite mediums and how I first came into art; a stint at LIFE magazine made me more confident in discussing it. Then I came upon exhibitions of new works by Gregory Crewdson and Stan Douglas, artists who use Hollywood-style techniques to stage works that look like film stills or photojournalism, respectively, with the small modification that they are false. These movies never existed; the events captured are staged. It turned out that truth no longer had any value in photography, and all that time in the LIFE archives may as well have been spent on Instagram.
I know a little more about art now, but still feel underqualified to write about Douglas’s “Ghostlight” at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art. I did see this muscular survey in person, where the layout wraps around Birth of a Nation (2025), the artist’s five-channel response to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic, which was screened at Woodrow Wilson’s White House and arguably the first blockbuster. Surrounded by that film are nearly forty works from the 1990s through to the present that touch on topics like settler colonialism and the complex work of image creation.
The exhibition takes its name from a large-format 2024 photograph that shows a vacant Los Angeles theater illuminated by a single lamp, which greets you upon entry. The name refers to the light that allows superstitious workers to navigate the stage after hours, but it’s clear that the title of the work goes deeper still. The fact that this single bulb illuminates the entire theater with such detail and beauty speaks to the history of all photography, which is nothing but the record of light, printed onto a piece of paper through the use of another kind of light.
But the early work is no slouch either. Hors-Champs (1992) recreates the vibe of a free-jazz concert on French television from the 1960s. It’s infused with the spirit of 1968, and could be mistaken for an archival work, though the performers occasionally drift into strange and unlikely places for an actual contemporary recording, like La Marseillaise and The Star-Spangled Banner. Such explicit politics are a tell; they make it all too perfect, which is signature Douglas. He doesn’t want you to actually believe that any of this is real.
One room at Bard is given over to “2011 ≠ 1848,” his exhibition for the Canadian pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale, a collection of work that should also be absorbed in the context of obvious politics. To comment on the contemporary ones, Douglas returned to 2011, the time of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. New York City, 1 October 2011 (2021) shows a confrontation with the police on the Brooklyn Bridge that could be mistaken for a scene from the George Floyd protests. But no: this is a fake scene from an earlier movement. Real or fake, 2011 or 2020, the end results were exactly the same.
“Stan Douglas: Ghostlight” is on view at the Hessel Museum of Art through November 30, 2025.
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