White and cerulean tiles color a laundromat’s floor. Faded posters litter its smudged walls, each advertising off-brand soap flakes and detergents that compete for the lowest dollar amount punctuated by an irritating 99-cent addendum. These substances leave their bloated containers to be measured out into ribbed lids and then dispensed into washing machines with soiled laundry. The machine’s door barks closed. Its cycle starts. And then it stinks—waiting at a laundromat for last week’s dirty load to be washed clean. Nameless neighbors pass through as time stretches thin; there isn’t much else that transpires. What at first feels like a virtuous effort at self-care, even self-respect — to clean one’s bunched underwear and sautéed onion-smelling jeans — soon turns into something responsibly unremarkable. The machines whoosh whoosh thunk along broadcasting another week gone by. This kind of waiting is a chore, and this chore intrudes on one’s quiet without rewarding good company. 

The following week is more of the same. Suds cling to the machines’ large, circular windows. The many suds are the machine’s eyes peering back at you. That is, until they pop. Water drains out. Expectedly, a machine’s cycle stops, and it emits a light click. In front of you, a neighbor drops his basket of wrinkled colors. He’s a tall, dark, handsome man with a dampened forehead. He pauses and rests a fist on his hip. He draws a breath, looks past you, notes to himself another round, another week. A click. It’s your turn to take out a clean load.

The scene is from an Erwin Olaf photograph. It’s one of many photographs on view at Stages, the late photographer’s show at Edwynn Houk Gallery that opened exactly one year after his death in 2023.

Known for ambitiously polished compositions that cover the mundanity of human affairs and the dramatic in equal measure, the photographs in this show capitalize on his articulate dramaturgy. The compositions of his photographs range from Dutch Old Master-inspired still lifes, such as bouquets of stiff triplets and fire lilies against flat, Modrian-like backgrounds, to Danish Old Master-inspired seated ladies waiting at windows.

Why don’t you get out of your chair, darling? He shoots in editorial black-and-white, too. Some of that work depicts 80s glamerati: a hooded Grace Jones looking mighty calm or a big man embracing fresh-plucked tulips, their shiny stems and leaves covering his bush. A pair of tattooed azaleas sit on his left bicep. This gives the big man a bit of a narrative: what’s with all the flowers, and what next does he plan to do with the unearthed blooms?

Olaf’s photographs have the quality of restrained stages. Photographed subjects — free of any distinguishable personality, become frictionless characters. They live inside quiet dramas. Looking at them beside American photography, which tends to traffic in superlatives (the worst drugs, the best sex, or the most extreme forms of self-invention by inhabiting toxic traits), Olaf depicts stability. His stages break down the fear of the unknown, of what comes next. He holds space for civilized endeavors.

I found this really present in his Palm Springs images. There’s a lone swimmer in an empty pool. In front of the swimmer stands a man with a camera. They are in the thick of luxurious domesticity, the camera man is Olaf squaring out his idyllic scene. Behind him is a glass-framed house with barely any signs of life and two or three awkward palm trees squatting in the distance. A few images from this series do capture the interior of these houses. You’ll find couples inside. They barely touch but seem to be coming to their senses. It’s a considerable shock.

All of these stages echo the rhythm of unremarkableness at the laundromat—a man draws a breath; he locks his eyes right past your stare, click, pause. That’s the sound of another clean and dry load ready to wear for another clean and dry week.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Belknap is a writer and editor living in New York. Since 2015, he has volunteered as an editor at Wikipedia, the internet’s free encyclopedia.

EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY