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Honest
rewards at a diverse Photo Regional
by
Timothy Cahill
Staff Writer, Times
Union
The Photography
Regional, now in its 26th year, has found its identity as an annual
showcase for emerging talent. Fewer and fewer of the area’s
established masters make their appearance in the show, and there
seems to be only a small community of journeymen whose progress
can be followed from year to year.
This year’s
Regional is the most rewarding in three years, modest in its ambitions
but engaging in its breadth and convincing in its honesty. The
show, at the Fulton Street Gallery in Troy, features some 70 images
representing 43 photographers. As juried by Westchester-based
art photographer Tanya Marcuse, the exhibit evinces a diversity
of styles and sensibilities that generates a pleasing energy.
The show’s
three award winners sum up the main facets of this energy. David
Brickman’s two first-place color scenes, taken in France,
express a preoccupation with landscape (and its urban counterpart,
cityscape) common among many of the exhibitors. Brickman’s
photos, of a back yard and fields through an open window, and
a brick building with sexually charged billboards, stand out for
their intellectual rigor and complex aesthetic.
Brickman is
interested in more than simple description; along with a very
subtle reading of a place’s specific light and color, his
pictures have embedded in them commentary on the mysterious effect
of photographing an object. In “Dedee’s View, Coinand,
France,” the dark frame of the window in the foreground might
well stand in for the distance between experience and expression
that photographic artists are constantly attempting to bridge.
A sense of
place is also central to Ronald Tipton’s elegiac black-and-white
studies of playgrounds, taken in late afternoon sunlight, and
Jim Flosdorf’s delicate panoramic “Spring Snow,”
in digital color. Theresa Swirdorski puts just the right touch
to her quiet rendition of sunshine and mist in the black-and-white
“Catskill Afternoon #2,” while George Romanation returns
us to the days of Atget’s Paris with his two wheels-within-wheels
pictures of Paris windows and reflections. Peter Cameron’s
large “Stems and Shadows” is a dramatic color view of
plant stubble and snow in glancing Hopperesque light, but the
image suffers from being being poorly matted.
Interpretive
witnessing
Mark McCarty’s
second-place portraits, of hospice patients, suggests the Regional’s
second main aspect, broadly, a sense of interpretive witnessing.
McCarty’s pair of large black-and-white studies seem less
a recording of appearance and character, more an investigation
on vulnerability and transition. His “Bob and Bobbie”
shows an elderly woman caught up in a blank stare of dementia
and fear, and her husband’s tender and desperate attempt
to hold her against the inevitable. “Jean,” of an old
woman pressing her fingers to her face, reflects on Dylan Thomas’s
resolve to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
“End
of Summer,” by Laura Glazer, translates the thwarting effects
of a cloudburst on a backyard picnic into a seriocomic ode to
reverie and reality. Her image of a smoking, abandoned charcoal
grill and flooded rainspout could only be enhanced by being printed
considerably larger. Like McCarty, Gail Nadeau also photographs
nursing-home residents, but focuses largely on their exhaustion
with life, and resignation. Chris DeMarco employs a wry color
sense in her “Hotel after Hazel” pictures, which describe
a hotel bathroom destroyed by a hurricane and reclaimed by vegetation.
Lori Kammerson celebrates a yummy decadence with her glaring,
white-on-white color still life “Cupcake.”
Antique and
alternative photographic processes have inspired Jeri Eisenberg’s
work for several years, and her three third-place winning images
in this Regional recall the dreamy pictorialism of a century ago.
Gauzy and radically out of focus, Eisenberg’s views of woods
and trees are evocations of that hypnopompic state when the landscape
is a place of wandering, not arriving.
Alternative
processes
Alternative
processes emphasize the photograph as object as much as statement,
and depending on the aesthetic of the photographer this “object-ness”
can range from precious to profound. The best of the lot on view
at Fulton Street begins with Ray Felix’s identity-drama “Day,”
from his “Alter I” series of self-portraits printed
on the mirrors of old medicine cabinets. On the surface, Felix
shows himself in shirt and tie; opening the cabinet, though, reveals
a far different biography.
Equally as
impressive is Christina Krahorst’s surreal roadside weedlot,
rendered in Van Dyke brown, a warm-tone, nostalgic process from
the 19th-century. Gothic ruins and Spanish moss heighten the monster-movie
creepiness of “Old Sheldon Church #1,” a sepia-toned
infrared view by Joleen Manoney-Roe. Juergen Reher’s “ziatype”
palladium print of a pomegranate, despite its small size, has
a sublime grandeur.
Finally, congratulations
are due to the Fulton Street Gallery’s Susan Myers, whose
determination saved the Photo Regional from oblivion three years
ago and whose commitment has kept it alive. Myers is the organizing
effort behind this logistically difficult exhibit; she arranges
the venue, sends out the call for entries, picks the juror, hangs
the show -- the list of duties and chores is long. Myers takes
them all on. Area photographers and photography lovers owe her
a debt of acknowledgment and thanks.
The 26th
Annual Photo Regional
- Where:
Fulton Street Gallery, 408 Fulton St., Troy
- Hours:
Noon-5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, Friday till 7 p.m.
- Closes:
May 15
- Info:
274-8464; http://www.fultonstreetgallery.org
Article
from the Times
Union (Sunday,
May 2, 2004)
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