Artsramble Archive

Back to On to Oz Studio Andrea Gomez

 

June 20, 2006
Five Photographers at the Collectors Gallery
by S.J. Coop

The New American Century is a blender on the high speed. We are constantly stung by the mosquitoes swarming from anywhere from Madison Avenue to The Corner. We are like the dizzy Dude in a Spike Lee conveyor belt shot, rolling smooth and slow through overdosed urban scape with billions of atomic images whizzing past. Some people love that. Not me. Don't know much about life but I know what I hate.

Photographers have the antidote. They can freeze the world. They give us the subject and perhaps its story, content or experience. Photography loves the object but is not objective. Daddy wants to take a picture of his little girl in her first frilly white dress, but as soon as he decides he doesn't want that garbage can in the background, he's made an edit. With editing, objectivity is out the window, replaced by choice–subjective choice. So Daddy adores his baby in the photo by moving a bit to the left and produces her image pure and simple. The picture doesn't imitate life. It reproduces his loving vision of her, framed through the quiet of the intimate peep hole.
The late John Dolan Myers' career was an example of this intimacy. He was a Private Eye, turned fine photographer. He would complain that the average person could look at his work and get in his face with: Why should I spend money on that when I can take my own pictures? John's answer was usually a feisty string of exemplatives, the verbal equivalent to a sock in the eye.
Brian Shawcroft's answer is his Morning New York. In the post-911 world most might be sentimentally attracted to the Twin Towers safe and protected in the gray skyline, but it's more than that. The NY skyline, arguably the most powerful symbol of our ability to build, create an an unimaginable living space on a single rock in a short 150 years, is a towering Babel. Yet in the picture, it is contained and diminished by a more powerful Nature. The bay and clouds encapsulate it. The buildings are allowed the sun's light only by the grace of a crack in the storm. (Shawcroft must have waited for that moment.) This is a small, quiet, B&W image which nonetheless wrings itself dry of every drop of statement. It is the essence of what photography can do.
Photoshop has made this patience of waiting obsolete (for example Barry Frylender's complicated C-prints of many optimal moments combined in one momentous frieze), yet when thinking about this process, the old-school, sit-on-your-arse and wait, there is an intangible richness.
Margie Nae's images are prettier, larger, in color, but try too hard to be art. They are finally crafted, beautiful, but say nothing new about their objects–flora.
Doug Van De Zande, Elizabeth Kunreuther and Alison Overton all use means to remove the image further from its photographic reality. My prejudice is that if a photographer decides to use digital, filtering or artist materials processes to enhance an image, it better be for a good reason.
Van de Zande's work in the show is disappointing. Here is an artist who has shown time and time again his understanding of the profundity of his subjects. Here the photographs become about his expertise with process, which although considerable, forces the images to hide behind the glitz. The attention turns to his process rather than the truth of his subjects.

Kunreuther is much more economic with her alterations. Applying oil pastel with a reason in Aqua Marine Street Light (Waffle House) for instance, she's able to deepen the darkness' mystery, without calling attention to the materials. Because of the pastels' differing sheen , the night becomes a black hole into unknown dimension. Careful where you move, Nightwalker. This is a successful marriage of media.
Overton's work achieves the same successful combination, but in a different direction. Whereas Kunreuther remains primarily a photographer, Overton goes to a different edge. Yes, she too remains a photographer but employs transparent pastel overlays thinking as a painter. Her technique changes the reality radically but still serves the photographic fantasy.
All 5 of these photographers would have John saying to his tormenting public: “OK, Clown, let's see you do that with your Brownie.” Take his challenge. See the show at The Collector's Gallery, study the work and pick up your own digital Brownie. Maybe you'll succeed; probably you won't; but for sure you'll grow. And maybe you'll come back to these and know why you should have at least one in your home.