Dereck Stafford Mangus is a Baltimore-based visual artist and writer who has created an extensive body of work on the subject of the square in the contemporary world. In a series of blog posts titled "Back to Square One" that will be appearing in AKA Blog in January and February (on dates that represent square roots – January 9th (3x3), 16th (4x4), 25th (5x5) and February 1st (1x1) – he will offer insights into The Square Project, his longstanding photographic project that has spanned two decades, and his obsession with this familiar yet intriguing geometric shape, which even became the subject of his graduate thesis at Harvard, “The Persistence of and Resistance to Structure: The Grid-Square Construct in Western Visual Culture.”
After explaining The Square Project to people, some get way into it and begin pointing out every square under the sun for me to photograph. “There’s one,” they say. “And here’s another,” and so on. Occasionally, people get annoyed when I decline to shoot a square they find. But the Project is not about capturing every single square I come across. As with writing–or any other creative endeavor for that matter–visual art is largely an editing process. That is, it’s as much about what you choose to keep out as it is what you elect to leave in. I can’t fully explain the method to my madness in shooting some squares but not others. Often it’s a matter of taste. Sometimes it’s because I’ve already shot a particular square, and is already in my collection. And while I love initiating new “square disciples,” I can’t quite figure out why some get more than a little disappointed when I choose not to shoot a square they point to.
Boston, 2008–2014
Oftentimes it’s not even a square! I remember one time, after explaining my Project to an acquaintance of mine, she suggested I shoot an object we happened upon that was clearly not a square. It was a rectangle with a ratio of about 4:5. Close, but no cigar. She became flummoxed when I declined to photograph this oblong, and claimed that I was “too uptight to be an artist.” I resent the notion that artists are supposed to be loosey-goosey flakes. I take my work seriously, as seriously as a scientist. Precision–especially when regarding something like the square–is paramount. Coworkers at a retail job I once had called me Standard Mangus teasingly because my drawer was consistently even during the count at the end of the day. I took their razzing as a compliment. Why would I want my drawer to be off?
New York City, 2007–2017
The square is a very specific thing. It’s a quadrilateral with four equal sides meeting at 90-degree angles. It’s not a rhombus. It’s not a parallelogram. The most concise definition for the square I’ve come across is “a rectangle with equal sides.” It’s also defined by its orientation. If you take the three basic shapes–the perfect circle, equilateral triangle, and equilateral rectangle, or square–and turn them 90° in your mind’s eye, the first two retain their original names, while the square becomes something else: a diamond. The diamond is a more dynamic shape than the square, suggesting movement. This is why a baseball field is referred to as a “baseball diamond” and not a “baseball square”: the action fans outward from a single point at home plate. The square is an arresting form. It stops you in your tracks. The symbol for the stop button on many remote controls and AV equipment is often a red square. The circle is a wheel, which turns or rotates, while the triangle triangulates. But the square stops. It is static. Still. Motionless. Like the period at the end of a sentence. The square ceases the flow of action. This makes it the ideal symbol for visual art, especially planar, two-dimensional art, which requires the viewer to situate themselves in front of it, standing erect, their eyes at a 90-degree angle to the work.
Baltimore, 2011–2016
Yet, in a sense, The Square Project isn’t even about squares. As with Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square, the equilateral rectangle is, for me, simply a framing device. But whereas Albers’ Homage is a formal study into the interaction of color, my Project is more of a conceptual investigation into the interaction of signs and sign systems as found in site-specific places, like Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The Square Project represents a kind of “categorical semiotics,” which is just a fancy way of saying an explicit exploration of the ways different signs and symbols interact with one another, in this case, through the medium of photography, itself a sign system. Literal signs, as in advertising or street signs–find their way into my series as well. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, I’ve noticed many square social-distancing floor decals.
Washington, DC, 2008–2017
The Square Project was born on film, but later developed into digital. In an undergrad photography course I began playing around with medium format, which makes square negatives. Or, rather, it can. Medium format film comes in 61mm-wide rolls, and allows you to shoot any type of rectangular ratio: from a perfect square at about 2.4” x 2.4” to a standard rectangular ratio of 2:3, or as long as the roll itself, which can be used to create long panoramas ideal for landscape photography. Many “digital natives” are only familiar with the basic rectangular format of digital cameras. Instagram converts images into squares and allows you to make your photos look “retro” with various digital filters. And while there’s nothing wrong with this, it does remove the chance effects that film permits. My undergrad photography professor referred to these haphazard “mistakes” found in film as “blessings from the Photo Gods.” In digital photography, the Photo Gods are dead. These days I shoot with a digital SLR mostly, as I’m not that romantic about the old ways. For me, photography is merely a means to an end, the medium is merely incidental in my work. I’m more interested in communicating my ideas, and photography is ideal for that. But the square is present in a digital photograph (even if rectangular) via the pixel, the tiny square points of light in a digital media.
Please remember to check this space for later segments of "Back to Square One" by Dereck Stafford Mangus, appearing in January and February 2021:
Back to Square One: Part 1
Back to Square One: Part 2
Back to Square One: Part 4
