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Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World

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I have owned Lewis Koch's book, Touchless Automatic Wonder, for about a month and have looked at it many times. It is slowly revealing new gems to me, adding more each time I review the pages. That's what really good poetry does and I think this book is a very rich poem. Mr. Koch has engaged and firmly grasped nothing less than the wonder of existence, the wonder of wonder. I see the book not so much about seeing in the optical sense, but about an inner seeing, a seeing beyond the physical realm that we experience every day, seeing into a spiritual realm and asking the big question: "Who are we and what is our responsibility".

"I like seeing things and I like words. There is something revelatory about the two together, an almost pentecostal feeling of seeing in tongues," writes Madison, Wisconsin-based photographer, Lewis Koch, in the introduction to his photobook Touchless Automatic Wonder (2009).

Seeing in tongues -- an incisive metaphor for this carefully considered sequence of seventy-nine images redacted from photographs made on four continents over a period of twenty-five years. Right-brain and left-brain rub against each other, sparking enigmatic word-in-image productions, leaving us, well, wondering.

Many of the images in Koch's book could be generally described by the phrase "things fall apart," so prevalent is the theme of entropy. Small town Vietnam war memorial, Wisconsin, USA (1990) is startling in that a list of names on a war memorial have been permitted to be reduced to state of utter dishevelment. Soldiers' names, the memory of their sacrifice, are given the same kind of indifference they were subjected to by their government in the first place.

In summary, Koch takes the "garbage" of our everyday life, the fragments of surviving stuff scattered about, and takes responsibility for it, in a visual sense. He's a bricoleur making intelligent pictorial concatenations of our cultural leftovers, conferring different meanings and possible functions on these fragments and pieces, permitting us the pleasure of joining him in wondering about all that stuff out there. This new photobook will be a welcome companion on your bookshelf next to those classics, Evans's American Photographs and Frank's The Americans.

James Hugunin, Professor of Art History, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

I feel a bit frustrated in writing a review for the book, Touchless Automatic Wonder - Found Text Photographs From The Real World, by Lewis Koch. It is because text media is believed to be one of the most 'accurate' media in humankind. Say, for a piece of music or a movie, as the last resort, we will go back to read a review that is written as text, hoping to find the ultimate answer out of that media. On text, Lewis succeeded in the process to deconstruct, and then reconstruct, and rediscover new value and meaning via images, and simply let it speak for itself. Now I am doing the opposite thing.

Because of its 'accurate' nature, we are sometimes still treating text media like myth. To some extent, we limit our sense. Follow the flow, you will feel enjoyable and fruitful in reading the images thoughout the book.

One evening, holding the book on hand, and I puzzled. I saw the title, and I saw the cover photo, that is a huge finger sign hanging, the ground covered with snow, and some shops or houses in the background. My heart was beating, and I smiled because I felt like I was peeking into the memory of Lewis. A very inspiring reading experience. An amazing book.

Lewis Koch's Touchless Automatic Wonder presents the reader with over a hundred images, almost all containing some text. For me, each of these images was a puzzle, though not necessarily one with a single correct "solution." It seems to me that looking at photos involves a certain kind of perceptual processing, one that, developmentally, predates language. Text, in Koch's pictures, is not always English text, but it is always a part of the image's design. So that the figuration of the text, its shape, movement and line, are apprehended as part of the aggregate visual image first. Then, inevitably, if the text is in a language I recognize, I read the text for a message; sometimes it's a coherent message, sometimes a fragment, but in each case, the way I decipher the text resonates with my understanding of the "picture." Sometimes this double (or triple) deciphering produces a koan, as Koch himself mentions in his Introduction. But often (in my experience) it's genuinely funny. Sometimes it adds context to an image which tilts my understanding in a new direction. Sometimes it serves to "humanize" a scene which is otherwise absent humans. It's always deepens the "picture" I have formed in my head.
Koch's photos are, as the photo credits show, from Europe, Asia, New York City, Mexico. But my favorites are from the area around Milwaukee and his hometown of Madison, WI. Photos of small towns, garages, run-down backstreets and diners are often simply presented as landscapes, occasionally absurd, often without people at all. What's striking is how "human" the photos feel anyway, because every photo has evidence of human activity in it; it suggests human presence, even if that presence isn't made overt. I'm reminded of the iconic "Killroy was here" message which was chalked all over Europe and Asia by WWII GI's; it was evidence, somehow funny and touching, that humans had been there, passed through, and left a message for someone coming later. It's hard to imagine what could be more human than language, and I'm awed by the way Lewis Koch incorporates it into his art. His work is a delight and deserves a larger audience; Touchless Automatic Wonder is a great place to start.

The book is a wonderful example of design and fine reproductions. At the risk of sounding like a Luddite; the opportunity to fully engage with the sequence, pairings, and individual images in a scale that makes them more accessible than the earlier web version is a great pleasure. I don't know what the future will hold for Kindle and the like but for me there is nothing like the printed page. The act of turning, and re-turning, to absorb the unfolding of this work while allowing my imagination and memory to also make it my own narrative.

Lewis Koch's photographs remind us that the eye is the Superman of the body--racing to connect the craziest, least likely things, saving meaning and humor for us in the midst of destruction, vacancies, bad hotel rooms, and death. Each of Koch's images captures a found text--a sign in a blurry field, the broken, neglected names of soldiers on a war memorial, numbers shaped from dough on a tabletop. The result is the voice of a text speaking from inside a context which may appear at first to be appalled by it, to resist it. But such "foreign" elements make peace again and again, thanks to Koch's persistent eye. His strategy returns us to the broken world we humans have wrought, and to our great gift for "wonder", which both documents and transforms our capacity to become automatic and grow numb. Nothing is ever alone in Koch's universe--our family is diverse as the spoons we set our placemats with, the newspapers that dangle above our nakedness, the names that keep our dead alive. This work is intensely humane. While Touchless Automatic Wonder may not console us in any easy way--Koch's imagination is too ironic, sometimes too caustic to be pretty--the book's heroic dislocations restore photography to the place it first occupied: as a miraculous trace of our deeply dreaming selves, a ghostly rib removed so we can feel just how much we miss it. Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text Photographs from the Real World