William Boling is an artist who builds typological works that examine ephemeral artifacts and situations in the vernacular landscape.
He collects photos from eBay auctions. [Possibly not safe for work.]
The vast majority of these images are confected for the purposes of the sell and will be erased. … A scholarly literature replete with postmodern analysis is beginning to form around the phenomenon of this new space and its new photography. The traditional indexicality of the still print is shifting with web based photography and nowhere is this seen more vividly than on eBay. … This collection is a kind of sampler that gestures toward – as my postmodern friends might have it — a hermeneutics of the opening phases of new photography in the virtual social space we call eBay. Or as I’ve come to see it, this collection is a digital reliquary for an evanescent photography.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’d say that some things deserve to disappear.