New York Shelf Life: Dirk Westphal’s Acts of Preservation

Abstract

This article considers four photographic series by New York artist Dirk Westphal. In each of these series, Westphal takes an ephemeral object (telephone booths, snack-cakes, mouthwash and small aquarium fish) and preserves it through a multimedia, multi-step process delivered via photography. His images and the labor to produce them trace and remake the intersection between the two essential components of capitalism: mass production and mass consumption. Yet he reinvents the labor in the form of the artist, the consumer in the form of the viewer. He learns from and transforms the market, collecting and remaking knowledge of urban space for his viewer-consumers.