Amir Zaki – lifeguards missing from their station

In college in the late 1960s, a friend of a friend knew a guy named Fred. Thanks to Fred’s bad luck, his fame spread beyond his immediate circle. He walked into an elevator that wasn’t there and had to be rescued, clinging to the cables. If he was on a bus, it broke down. A teaching assistant lost his research paper. There were no copies. He went fishing, and his girlfriend’s hook snagged his cheek.

Rumor had it that Fred carried Kenneth Fearing’s Dirge in his pocket.

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;

   bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow–

One day, Fred’s fortunes rose. He had scored a summer job as life guard at a posh LA hotel. The pay was great, the work light and the atmosphere relaxing. What could go wrong? On the first day, arriving as dawn broke, he found a corpse floating face down in the water. Because he failed to jump in to check for vital signs, he never got a chance to sit in the life guard station.

Looking at Amir Zaki‘s digitally manipulated and color-saturated photos of life guard towers in L.A., Fred came to mind.

Not only is no one there, no one could be there.

They are cool-school emblems of futility, a perfect match for Raymond Chandler’s view of swimming pools, a world away from David Hockney’s:

Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool.

At James Harris Gallery through Feb. 20