The Brooklyn Rail

After nearly two centuries and shelves of commentary miles long, we in the art world do not have a clear idea about photography. We know what it is, AI notwithstanding, but we have not been able to say who is looking and why. Or, rather, we have not been willing to acknowledge what we know about those things, so that we might actually begin to appreciate what is in front of us. Most vivid case in point: the photographs of Isaac “Drift” Wright.

Wright’s first exhibition in New York City introduced dramatic photographs into the white cube that usually have no place there but are tremendously popular, for a variety of reasons. Wright positioned himself high atop significant landmarks, including the New York Times Building and the Queensboro Bridge, and while elevated, also directed drones to capture views that reflect his feeling of awe and transcendence. That sense of photography as a purely personal and highly occasional repertoire of views, with apparently little formal premeditation, links his work to an entire generation whose primary outlet is social media, which prioritizes the sharing of experience in real time. Museums and galleries don’t know how to judge such work, distrust the pleasure it gives and, so, largely ignore it. In Wright’s case, the work’s spectacular character can blind them not just to its emotional imperatives, but more importantly to its artistic ambitions.

Wright’s internet nom de guerre is Drift. In the breathing world, Drift has been an embattled photographer, prosecuted by and for the pictures he has taken. After providing chaplaincy services in the US Special Forces, Wright left the military burdened with his own and other soldiers’ trauma. He discovered by accident that the only way to put down that burden was to ascend—literally. Wright had a dream in which he was instructed to take a camera and go to Houston, so he went and found himself on the roof of a skyscraper under construction. He joined the ranks of what are loosely known as urban adventurers, usually young people who are willing to defy the rules (and risk the legal and sometimes medical consequences) in order to get to places they aren’t supposed to be. Wright discovered a nourishing solitude and a new perspective on frontiers: physical, social and psychological.

As he posted his photographs online, he made a host of new friends but also some enemies. The art world wasn’t the only place that had problems with his work. The men and women of law enforcement in several states began to track him, labeling him a public menace, and he was arrested and jailed on several occasions, including immediately after the opening of this exhibition. We recall that Philippe Petit’s punishment after his highwire walk between the Twin Towers was giving demonstrations to fascinated school kids. But coupling the phrases “person of color” and “ex-military” with Wright’s PTSD virtually guaranteed a more aggressive response. Wright has paid an emotional and financial toll fighting such punitive prosecution, which has also made him something of a folk hero on the internet and led to a highly profitable NFT sale, giving him the breathing room to take even more chances.

To see why the pictures are important, however, we have to look past the tabloid drama. I first saw a Wright photograph taken at night on top of the great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza several years ago on the internet. I had two thoughts: How did he get up there? And, I want to go there. This was old school photo fascination straight out of the nineteenth century: Francis Frith, Felice Beato, J.B. Greene, and so many others, bringing the middle-class viewers of the Occident provocative glimpses of places they wouldn’t likely visit but could now vividly imagine. Wright amps up the frisson of voyeurism by putting himself at obvious physical risk, stoked by a desire “to overcome the limit of my own fear,” as he put it in a recent conversation. The art world would probably label his manipulating a drone on a tower perch above the New York Times Building (Don’t Fear the Reaper, 2023) as performance art, a Chris Burden of the stratosphere. That’s a point, but the issue of authentic presence seems much more pertinent. The obvious intent of these photographs printed large is to bring viewers into the scene, to surmount their usual distance from images and raise the hair on every part of their body. That’s how the viewers I observed in the gallery responded. Vertigo was the downside, but expansiveness was the payoff. The photographs seem above all to manifest the sovereignty of individual consciousness, for which the photographer’s view is testimony. This is an updated romanticism. Imagine Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer on the Deer Isle Bridge, shrouded in Maine mist (And When We Die It Will Feel Like This, 2023).

For the art world, these photographs must appear too subject-driven and too little conceptual. Meanwhile, Wright understands, much like the Bauhaus’s pioneers, the power of point of view and the incredible compression of lens perspective. He gives us eyes outside our bodies, as László Moholy-Nagy put it, with the ultimate goal of promoting a more dynamic and unfettered response to the world. This is big-ticket spiritual aspiration with a potential political impact. “I want to discover extraordinary states of being and bring them to people,” he remarked, “so that we can look beyond the systems of control that determine so much of our lives.”

It’s hard to be down when you’re up, read an old promo for the World Trade Center. In these breathtaking images, photography becomes the instrument of personal liberation, and personal liberation is the precondition for a wider and deeper valuation of freedom.