Peter Garfield
It was about ten years ago that Peter Garfield began taking photos of houses falling out of the sky.
Blurry, at times lacking in basic composition and focus, Garfield’s work appeared to be a collection of impromptu snapshots in the tradition of UFO photography more than any kind of gallery art. Part of Garfield’s method is to embrace the most important component behind the UFO phenomenon — the fakery of it. The photos are not real photos of houses flying in the sky, but there is a back story to the images that extends perception of fiction as reality, the idea that Garfield’s photos reflect a larger effort to take houses and drop them for the purpose of art. Garfield’s method of utilizing the iconography he had created to expand into an entire mythology was similar, also, to the way information about UFOs is passed around popular culture — he made a book that put the images into their fictional content in the form of his artist catalog for a show.
These days, Garfield is working in film and exploring very similar themes, but the falling houses are still well remembered by lovers of the absurd.
JM: I felt as though your photos were so realistic that they couldn’t be anything other than fakes.
PG: The whole thing is fiction. The photos themselves, of the houses falling, are done with models, very small models. I break them up and glue stuff to them and make them look more realistic and destroyed and then the documentary stuff was all done. The helicopter images and the crane images were the first time I had ever used Photoshop —that was ‘97 — and that Web site is actually from 1998, it hasn’t changed once. The black and white one is myself, a bunch of other people, friends and actors. There are some interior shots in my friends’ design space.
