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SV-010, 1979, was the first photograph in Robbert Flick’s now-famous series of modular images of the Southern California landscape. Flick’s system changes from one work of art to the next—an indication, perhaps, of how much trust he actually places in formulae.

SV-010 was made according to an artist-devised code requiring an exposure at each utility pole in an area. Such a scientific method, though—even the excess of a hundred independent exposures—does nothing to explain or relieve the scene’s banality.