— SCOTT INDRISEK. Deputy Editor of Artsy, Former Editor-in-Chief of Modern Painters

I can’t be alone in thinking (occasionally or often) that the ordinary dirty world, in all its unpolished, slackerish nonchalance, possesses more organic beauty and ugliness and ugly beautifulness than the bulk of what is sanctified as contemporary art. This is either proof of a real lack of faith in contemporary art or a semi-foolish surplus of faith in the accidental possibilities of the everyday. In any case, I imagine I share the latter condition with Michael Haggiag, a photographer whose eye is laser-focused on the world’s small and curious geographies – a sliver of abraded wall, a bit of road defaced with orange construction markings.

He is heir to the likes of Aaron Siskind and perhaps Jacques Villegié. Haggiag celebrates gunk, dirt rust, cement, splinters, stained metal, sidewalk, crosswalk, curb – the city’s rampant layers. He finds an obsessive interest in little nothings underfoot and, in memorializing them, makes us interested as well. Like Siskind, he is aware that the built world already holds its own noble gestures.

It seems effortless – but it is not. All of these compositions are found, but that doesn’t mean anyone can find them; it takes a certain agility to take the temperature of what’s just around, to separate these moments of beauty from the chaff. Our surroundings are all clamor and misdirection, advertisement and banality. It takes an artist to pause amidst the noise and say: This one, this thing, is what matters.

But still, it might be possible to be trained, or at least changed. There is a populist impulse behind these photos, a generosity in sharing what was always there. Visit one of Michael Haggiag’s exhibitions and then leave, walk back into the world and look. It’s a neat trick, an inadvertent schooling in a new way of seeing.