It Either Sinks or Floats

Road Cone Fulcrum. 2023.

Adam Ekberg has described his body of work as an “alchemy of sorts.” The subjects of his large-scale photographs include, among other things, a catapulted lawn chair, shaving cream zipping through a ring of fire, and milk performing all kinds of acrobatics. Everyday stuff conscripted for hyperactive still lifes, household items clowning around and pulling off stunts. A storybook could be spun out of any of these situations.

Take Bic Lighter, Banana and Cocktail Umbrellas, for example, a Mallakhamb-like arrangement of toothpick on lit lighter on fruit on toothpick that raises more questions the longer you look at it. Assuming this thing wasn’t glued together (it wasn’t), how in the world does that banana stay poised on the point of that toothpick? How does the lighter stay lit if no one’s pressing it? Could be the other umbrella, how it’s wedged into the spark wheel just so. But then how long before the umbrella catches on fire?

Bic Lighter, Banana and Cocktail Umbrellas. 2017.

To the extent that Ekberg composes portraits of performance art, many of them are also small miracles of timing—freezing the moment between up and down, over and under, here or there. The power in these photographs isn’t so different from what animates street photography, capturing a fleeting and incongruous arrangement in a way that communicates meaning. Also, in many cases, you can’t help but wonder about the setup. What happened outside the frame is as much a part of the shot as what’s in it. This is a causality circus.

To be whimsical in an age suffocated by menace is to practice a certain kind of bravery. Ekberg’s silliness is calculated and layered, a provocative comedy that embraces trial and error. “I think routine failure with moments of success—and even the question of whether success is the opposite of failure—has become more of a focus over the years,” he told me. “Just the endeavor of doing it as an exercise, regardless of outcome. What does it mean to be doing these arguably frivolous things that don’t matter, especially in the times in which we live? I think committing completely to something that doesn’t matter actually makes it matter.

Predictably, Ekberg’s work has been met with some dismissiveness, depending on the audience—though contempt is a little more surprising. “Sometimes people get kind of pissed, which I find really fascinating. I’ll get emails or comments from people who are simply not on board,” he said. “They’re quick to say they know how I pulled it off, as if I’m trying to fool them. And I get it, because you don’t need a degree in art or physics to see what’s happening. If you want to deconstruct it, and be a little cynical, you can see what’s going on. Or, you know, do you want to entertain something a little more fantastical?”

As an analogue photographer—Ekberg shoots in large-format film—that drive to crystalize the fantastical requires methodical stubbornness. “When I’m teaching, I tell students to take something to the end, print it, make the best print you can, put it on the wall, spend time with it. Because the easiest thing to do is to just dismiss something. And if photographers gave in to that, the only projects they’d do would be tried and true and unsurprising. More and more, I’m interested in the really good bad idea. So I try to see everything through to a finish point, and then spend some time with it to see if it sinks or if it floats.”

Eclipse. 2012.

That ambition also makes shooting in film labor-intensive. For every perfectly suspended pineapple eclipse, a dozen fails preceded it. He might burn through sixteen shots of someone’s foot or hand in the frame before getting an explosion just right. “I use four-by-five film, and it’s a bit expensive. I’m kind of semi-cognizant that every time I hit the shutter it costs X amount of dollars. But it also allows me to make a print that’s really big and looks perfectly tight. Still, all sorts of anomalies arise, not least of which is the shutter speed on my camera only goes to a 500th of a second, so you have to get an object that’s launched into the air at its apex, because if it’s still going up or down, you’ll see the blur. So there’s always things going wrong.”

Because of their physicality, Ekberg sketches out the shots before he sets them up. The inspiration could come from daydreaming what ifs, or something that catches his eye at the grocery store. A certain attentiveness to the small mechanics of the world opens up all kinds of possibilities. Just riding a bike to work can evolve into art. He tacks a collection of these sketches on a wall in his studio barn, follows one down the rabbit hole—even if it means driving twelve hours away, to the right landscape—shoots until he gets it, or thinks he gets it, then tacks the test print up where the sketch used to be.

None of it, however, is fully articulated in the abstract. An image both requires process as much as it captures it. “It really is just grasping,” he says. “A lot is mark-making, the absurdist mark of trying to make something happen that shouldn’t have been there. There’s no reason for it to be. And when I make the work, I don’t think about an audience. I kind of do it for myself. But I love that it’s not really done until someone sees it. The completion of the process is the myriad different interpretations that people walk away with, good and bad. It meets you where you are.”

Ideally, that confluence of art and audience leads to more surprises. Like when Hamza Walker, who was teaching a seminar during Ekberg’s graduate-school days, dropped by his studio and approached a print Ekberg had just put up. “I watched him laugh while playing air guitar in front of it. It was one of the great affirmations of someone truly connecting to the work!”

Or when, during an exhibition, a friend’s father—not an artist—found Ekberg near his print of a Eureka vacuum cleaner running on a frozen lake. They both stood there a minute, taking it in, and then the father turned to him and said, “I like it.” Another pause. “From what I can see,” the father added, “I can tell you like to be in the middle of nowhere. I too like to be in the middle of nowhere.

Ekberg nodded.

“It was really on point,” he says.