John Houck
Baby Shoes, Never Worn
2013
John Houck, Baby Shoes, Never Worn, 2013.
Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood. The image depicts a box, addressed to the artist’s mother, that once contained—it can be assumed—baby shoes. Houck layers the photograph with multiple exposures, lending an uneasy tripling effect to the static object. Borrowing his title from Ernest Hemingway’s enigmatic, apocryphal six-word novel “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn”, Houck’s photograph engages the ideal and image of childhood from the distanced point of view of the camera’s lens.
John Houck works primarily in photography and specializes in still-life vignettes. To make his works, Houck arranges an object on a sheet of paper, photographs, and prints it, then places that print back into a new composition, repeating the process again and again until arriving at an aggregate image. The layers appear to be digitally altered, but he does not utilize any post-production interventions. But Houck is not a purist by any means; he is significantly influenced by his professional experience as a computer programmer, and his artistic methodology mirrors a kind of algorithmic code. By referencing a conventional artistic genre through an iterative and contingent process, Houck offers up photography as a mode of thought.