Marco Breuer. “Shot (C-917).” 2009. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Roger M. Dalsheimer Photograph Acquisitions Endowment, Baltimore, BMA 2009.125. © Marco Breuer.

Just as a darkroom photographer, this totally speaks to me. I have totally felt like that, and I’m sure every darkroom photographer has thought about taking a shotgun to everything. But to actually do it is just genius.

I can’t imagine being able to predict how it was going to look. A shotgun in the darkroom? How are you going to predict that? And that’s the beauty of it. Because this and that [pointing to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Arctic Ocean, Nordkapp”] are two of the most abstract things in here, and the fact that everything in between is fair game and acceptable and celebrated is the beauty of photography. That’s the thing I really love about all of it. A lot of it we don’t respond to, a lot of it we don’t know why we’re responding to it.

And that’s the beauty of this. That is fucking brilliant. That thought is, honestly, I think I’ve felt that way, but I don’t think the thought has crossed my mind in quite the same way. Because I’m looking at it, and I know exactly what it is before I walk up to it, but the fact that it was done in the dark—so that the colors that have happened, happened from that friction, from the shot firing through the paper—that’s fucking cool. And that’s completely unique, it’s the only one—I mean, you could do that 100 times, they may all look similar, but we really only need to see one to get it. But that’s the beauty of photography. I love the attainability of it, that anybody can do it if you’re inspired to point a camera at it. So these [Breuer and Sugimoto] are the high-water marks for how whack you can do, and then everything else is accepted on some level. And you can’t top that. But a lot of people might see this and dismiss it, just not get it at all. But for me, it’s from my darkroom roots that I can relate to a shotgun blast in a darkroom. That’s huge for me.

> Email Sam Holden