EXHIBITION ESSAY

Photographing Phantoms
By Christopher Anthony Velasco

Queer archives are rarely linear; they circle, retract, reconstruct histories, and remember and forget simultaneously. Alan Joseph Marx’s PALINDROME 91–19 demonstrates this. For nearly three decades, Marx has wandered the Southern California landscape through bedrooms, beaches, freeways, parking lots, and anonymous corners. His photographs capture not just moments but the remnants of time: vibrations, the unknown, and the constant possibility of vanishing. For Marx, photography is not neutral. It is an emotional entanglement. A kind of complicity. He pays respect to death through longing and tenderness, and we do too. In gazing, we honor the residue of time: dust, echoes, unforgotten ghosts. To look is to participate, to acknowledge that the past still influences the living. The viewer joins Marx in this ritual, paying tribute to what photographs can no longer hold.

His images dwell in a charged space between life and death, desire and its afterimage. They are nearly cinematic. Think of New Queer Cinema, especially Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992) and Akihiro Suzuki’s Looking for an Angel (1999). The fugitives in Araki’s film, rushing toward demise, and Suzuki’s lost “angels” resonate with Marx’s subjects. All wander. All embody queer survival. All haunt the black-and-white pages of Palindrome 91-19.

This cinematic parallel reflects queer life itself: not linear, but a series of frames with intention, failure, and repetition. These moments reveal meaning only in hindsight. As Volker Pantenburg writes in Harun Farocki / Jean-Luc Godard: Film as Theory, cinema’s “illusion of movement” is built from stillness.¹ That contradiction pulsates through Marx’s photographs. This connects to Jack Halberstam’s concept of the “queer art of failure,” a mode that “dwells in loss, disappointment, shame, and fractured LGBTQI histories.”² Failure becomes Marx’s method, resisting perfection, coherence, and resolution. On the All Through a Lens podcast, “Polaroid Is Painless w/ Alan Marx,” he explains that although he knows the technical basics, he prefers “to do it wrong.”³ His so-called failures (blur, underexposure, overexposure) are acts of defiance. They demand interpretation, reminding us that the only true failure in photography is the failure to see.

Alex Thompson argues that perfection in photography is “a closed, sealed surface” with no entrances or exits.⁴ Marx rejects perfection because it lacks mystery. For him, photographic failures become relics of presence: camera hesitation, breath breaking the frame, the tremor of grief, the entwined chemical and spiritual processes of analog film. In Palindrome, memory is not fixed; it fractures, leaks, and contradicts. The photograph’s indexical nature remains, but it does not always reflect what we remember. Some experiences shape us precisely because they cannot be entirely recalled. This echoes Christopher Bollas’s concept of “the unthought known,” developed in The Shadow of the Object and later discussed by Ruth Rosengarten in her essay ‘‘...and death I think is no parenthesis’: the aged, the ill, and the dying in contemporary photographic practice.”⁵ To remember is to acknowledge wounds that refuse articulation. Loss vibrates through these pages, not only the deaths of friends, mentors, lovers, but also the quieter losses of former selves. Marx’s camera helps him cope and honor without embalming.

A language of desire runs through the work, a tension between viewer and subject, a blend of pleasure and pain. His subjects are aware but never objectified; the images reveal queer intimacy: friends becoming family, fleeting nights, spaces that disappear right after being documented. Here, the viewer becomes an accomplice, mirroring Marx’s own complicity in the act of looking. PALINDROME 91–19 spans decades, showing queerness as something that endures through looping, forgetting, and repeating. It is a visual diary and a cinematic gesture: an elegy for loss and a celebration of what remains. A queer, restless, unfinished archive, tangled in emotion. Not to prevent loss, but to sit with it; not to perfect the image, but to see more deeply.

In the end, Marx offers not answers but a queer way of seeing. I provide a new way of “Looking”:

I came to see,
But I can’t keep still.
The eye avoids the light,
I must leave my shadow behind.

My heart belongs to different hearts,
A life seen in fragments,
I search,
With no fixed destination.
Another day in Heaven,
With tiny silvers growing on my body,
Shine across Los Angeles,
But I still pay attention,
With the sun in my eyes.

My emotion is ruptured,
I must drift along,
With promises of metals. ⁶

¹ Volker Pantenburg, “Taking Pictures—Photography and Film,” in Harun Farocki / Jean-Luc Godard: Film as Theory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

²Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.

³“Polaroid Is Painless w/ Alan Marx,” All Through a Lens (podcast), episode released October 2023.

⁴Alex Thompson, “The Failure of the Perfect Picture,” PetaPixel, January 19, 2021.

⁵Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Ruth Rosengarten, “‘…and death I think is no parenthesis’: the aged, the ill and the dying in contemporary photographic practice,” Photographies 10, no. 1 (2017): 47–64.

⁶Christopher Velasco, “Looking” poem. 2025.