A.L. Steiner at 80WSE

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Tillmans can be oppressive with his cloying sentiment, that Sontagian moribund, everything mementos, everything matters, everything porcelain, precious. Show me a Tillmans photo of people having fun and know its death. Opposite Steiner's photo suites: that no one matters - that you can discard any of these photos - replace them with any other moment of life. Ignore the politics: here there's actually people having fun. People smile, people jest. This is not the search for the perfect embalming light. It's not people in the societal bondage gear of photography or Cindy Sherman cruelty. There is no distant connoisseurship. Just what collectivizes in the fringes of your eyes at night. 

See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

A.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

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A man made blaze-orange and reflective through the stranger emergent rules of capital's risk assessment, donning its anonymous uniform highlighting his labor we are meant to ignore in a world he manicures to pretend the world isn't ending, like we're keeping something intact, like there will be something intact, scrubbing the earth. Channeling all the tragedy of the paradoxical rules that stem from of our world's "rational actors." I.e. To save cents per worker on insurance we paint them orange. Emergence is known for producing some of the most spectacular feats in nature - snowflakes, bird flocks, Giant's Causeway - and in Capital it causes our workers to turn orange. The absurdity is as staggeringly beautiful as it is tragic for the once human who is made subservient to it. I mean maybe this man wanted it. This anonymous and yellow drone trimming our earth to meet the desires of those who control it, channeled here in a photograph of Steiner's personal-as-political best.