In the moments that we find ourselves walking down a city street, or standing in any public space, we are aware of the flow of other people around us. However there is another river that we are standing in, a river of people who have traversed these same spaces over the decades before us. If a videotape could be run showing the past and the future of that identical point in space we could see that we are literally surrounded by a history of people in motion stretching far into the past and the future who have occupied or will occupy the same space as us. The essentially tragic brevity of our existence is revealed by this form of consciousness; our essential ties to our predecessors and descendants perhaps counterbalances this sadness.

In a suite of ten large color prints taken from his project titled Tide, Geiger investigates the presence and absence of the figure, mostly in architectural space. The built environments Geiger selects are what we think of as non-spaces: airport waiting rooms, malls, and the like, that have no essential particularity or personality, generic spaces that could be anywhere on earth. We see suggestions of humanity, more or less manifested. In some instances a human figure is merely suggested by distortions in space; in others human outlines are clearly marked. In each case the artist is making reference to our fleeting presence in space.

If that same magical videotape as imagined above were played at a fast enough speed, human activity would disappear in a blur and architectural time would be the remaining reality. Geiger thereby participates in the field of artists who are examining the tacit social coercions of architecture and built environments, from San Francisco’s Doug Hall to Geiger’s countrywoman, Germany’s Candida Hofer. Geiger, a committed outdoorsman, also utilizes the flip side of tragedy (victim of time), which is comedy (mocking time). He goes to nature and removes people from images of interaction with deer, Yosemite hikes, and the like, in a more light-hearted exploration of the possible beneficial effects of human disappearance.