LOOKING / SEARCHING
Same but Different
Jon Riethmuller
2026
Looking / Searching
Looking / Searching brings together five photographs made at different moments and in different circumstances. Although they were not originally conceived as a single series, their juxtaposition reveals recurring concerns with looking, searching, intimacy, identity and interior space.
Looking and searching are related but different acts. Looking describes seeing; searching suggests that something remains unresolved—something absent, desired, remembered or not yet understood.
The figures within these photographs occupy different states of attention. They look outward, turn away, gather together, withdraw into thought or conceal themselves from view. Their surroundings—rooms, furniture, clothing and personal possessions—provide evidence of lives being lived, but they do not fully explain them.
At the centre of the group, The Dinner Party brings three people together within a shared domestic space. They are physically close yet appear to inhabit separate psychological worlds. Around them, the other photographs move between observation, movement, introspection and withdrawal.
The works were made across different periods of my practice. Revisiting them now is itself an act of searching. Photographs once understood individually acquire different meanings through proximity to one another. Relationships emerge that were neither planned nor necessarily visible when the images were first made.
Looking / Searching therefore considers photography not simply as a means of recording what was before the camera, but as a way of returning to experience and asking new questions of it.
Sometimes searching does not lead to finding. It leads instead to another way of looking.
01
Looking
Masculine Me(n)
2011
Digital photograph / archival pigment print
Looking begins the sequence with an act that appears deceptively simple. A figure faces away from the camera and towards a window. We can see him, but we cannot see what he sees.
Looking becomes both an action and a condition: an acknowledgement that seeing does not necessarily produce understanding.
02
Backpack
Masculine Me(n)
2011
Digital photograph / archival pigment print
A backpack introduces the possibility of movement: arrival, departure or somewhere still to be reached.
The figure looks directly towards the camera, yet the circumstances surrounding him remain unresolved. The photograph offers presence without explanation.
03
The Dinner Party
2012 / 2026
Staged digital photographic tableau / archival pigment print
Three people gather around a formally prepared dining table. They occupy the same physical space but appear psychologically separated.
No conversation is visible. Their gazes travel in different directions.
The domestic interior is filled with objects, books, photographs, furniture and the evidence of accumulated lives. Yet physical proximity does not necessarily produce intimacy.
Within Looking / Searching, The Dinner Party becomes the point at which looking outward begins to turn inward.
04
Meditation
Constructing Masculinity
2012
Digital photograph / archival pigment print
The search becomes quieter.
The figure's attention is directed downward and inward. The bedroom—one of the most private of domestic spaces—becomes a temporary place of contemplation.
The photograph offers no indication of what is being considered. What matters is the state of withdrawal itself.
05
Unknowing (Interior with Concealed Figure, Naples)
The Unknown Icon
2012
Staged digital photograph / archival pigment print
The sequence ends not with discovery but with concealment.
A body remains visible while identity disappears beneath a white cloth. The room can be examined in detail, yet the person occupying it becomes unknowable.
Unknowing resists the expectation that searching must eventually produce an answer.
Perhaps not knowing is also a way of looking.
Looking Again
These photographs were made approximately fifteen years before I brought them together as Looking / Searching.
They have not changed, but I have.
Returning to them from the perspective of 2026 has made me conscious that a photograph does not possess a single fixed meaning. Its material form may remain relatively stable while the lives surrounding it continue.
An image made within one project can subsequently enter another constellation of images and produce relationships that were neither intended nor visible at the time of its making.
This process is central to my idea of the Living Archive.
The archive is not simply somewhere that earlier work is stored. It can become a generative space in which photographs, objects, memories and experiences are returned to and allowed to produce new work and new understanding.
The Works Together
Bringing the five photographs together changed the way I understood them. Works made for different projects began to reveal relationships across time: between looking and withholding, movement and stillness, intimacy and separation, visibility and concealment.
The exhibition exists first as an act of re-curating the archive.
ITSLIQUID International Contest 2026
Looking / Searching developed while selecting five works for submission to the ITSLIQUID International Contest, 20th Edition, in 2026.
What began as an exercise in selecting individual photographs became an unexpected curatorial process. Images from different bodies of work began to form a new conversation.
The competition became the catalyst; the act of looking again became the work.
Afterword
Same but Different
The phrase same but different emerged while considering the distinction between looking and searching.
The two activities are closely related but not identical.
Looking may simply acknowledge what is before us.
Searching suggests that something remains absent.
The same distinction might be applied to these photographs.
They are the same images I made in 2011 and 2012, but they are different because I encounter them from another point in my life.
The subjects remain suspended within the photographic moment.
I have continued.
Perhaps this is one of photography's peculiar relationships with time. A photograph insists that something was, while every subsequent encounter with it occurs in a changing present.
In searching through earlier work, I am therefore not simply recovering the past.
I am asking what it can tell me now.