Photography Quarterly #73

julie galant

NewPhotography &

DigitalImagery

Critical

The Center acknowledgessupportfrom individuals, members, corporations, foundations, and public funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.

STAFF: Executive Director, Colleen Kenyon; Associate Director, Kathleen Kenyon; Assistant Directors, Lawrence P. Lewis and Kate Menconeri.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS: Frederick Evans, Sheva Fruitman, Edward Garbarino, Rollin Hill, Kenro lzu, David Karp, Colleen Kenyon, Arie Kopelman, Rebecca Lawton, Ellen Levy, Marcia Lippman, Tanya Marcuse, Marc Miller, Ken Shung, Alan Siegel, and Tom Wolf.

ADVISORY BOARD: Ellen Carey, Philip Cavanaugh, Susan Ferris, Julie Galant, Howard Greenberg-Founder, Sue Hartshorn, W.M. Hunt, Greg Kandel, Peter Kenner, Laurie Kratochvil, Carol LeFlufy, Susana Torruella Leval, Peter MacGill, Kitty McCullough, Elliot Meisel, Ann Morse, Sandra Phillips, Jose Picayo, J. Randall Plummer, Lilo Raymond, Ernestine Ruben, and Neil Trager.

DARKROOM MANAGER:Ben Caswell. VOLUNTEERS: David Gurwitz and Bob Wagner.

INTERNS: Rachel Crognale and M izuyo Aburano.

PHVTOGNAl'HYQuG1terly m, Vol. 18 No. 2, ISSN 0890 4639. Copyright© 1998 Center for Photography at WO(xlstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York 12498. Catalog essays © I 997 Margarett Loke, Julie Galant, 1998 Christian Viveros-Faune. All photographs and texts reproduced in this Quarterly are copyrighted hy the artists. All rights reserved. No part of this puhlication may he reproduced or transmitted in any form or hy any 1neans, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the Center for Photography at Woodstock. The opinions and ideas expressed in this puhlication do not represent official positions of the Center. Printing hy Kenner Printing Co., NYC. Editing and design hy Kathleen Kenyon and Kate Menconeri. Copy editing hy Teri Roiger and Joan Munkacsi. Composition hy Digital Design Studio, Kingston, NY. The PHOTOGRAPHY Quarterly is distrihuted hy Bernhard DeBoer, Inc., Nutley, New Jersey 071 JO.

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COVER: Sheila-Metzner, Umitled(abstract building), black & white Fresson, 1992, Collectionof C Kenyon/MarcMiller.

Introduction

Introduction

In this issue we showcase artists, curators, and writers who build community through th_e magic of the media. Kenro Izu, who has put his pictures out in the world through exhibition and publication, now uses sales of his work to better a district by erecting a children's hospital in Cambodia under the ·umbrella of Friends Without a Border. Julie Galant, director of Fotofolio "in New York City, looked across the nation to form a group of innovative imagemakers who are constituting new art pathways inclusive of the digital mode. This selection of portfolios is accompanied by messages written by the artists so a -wide association may better follow their constructions. Luis Mallo, like Izu, sees shrines as a special kind of production; both artists fashion private depositories as sites to show the public.

Just as we put together this publication to share the passion of photography with our international community, so too, do we form family by sponsoring a year-round program of Center internships. Since 1985 CPW staff has trained over eighty-five students in arts administration and education. Interns have come from all states and from China, England, France,Japan, and Sweden. Students leave this teaching ready to face the real world. Many have found employ at magazines such as Time and Money; others have been accepted by graduate schools or alternative training centers of their choice; and several have established themselves as photography dealers, teachers, and studio managers. As these young people build their careers so too do they bring the Center's mission to the outside sphere. •

Kenrolzu:the photographerwhosawthe light

NewPhotography & DigitalImagery JochenBrennecke,BethEdwards,CatherineGfeller, JudithHarold-Steinhauser,AnnGinsburghHofkin, JulieMcConnell,VincentSerbin,HarrietTannin, LannyWebb,CeceWheeler,DavidWright

In Light

CriticalMonuments:the photography of LuisMallo

OpportunityKnocks/NotedBooks

Following are testimonials by the 1997 workshop interns: Elizabeth Popp / Being an intern at the Center's Woodstock Photography Workshops gave me the chance to discover how my life and the lives of others can be deeply touched by the world of photography. The act of seeing enhances my environment as I find excitement in places other see as familiar. Wben I can perceive the beauty in any place, my life becomes more meaningful.

Steve Leib le/ The diversity of the students and teachers I met this summer was amazing. They all had important lessons to teach me about photography and the desire to stick with photography at any cost. Many of the students had dedicated a part of their life to doing something they loved and there is nothing more inspirational than that.

Mickey May / I felt stuck when I arrived here. This summer gave me room to grow, and to trust in myself. Dawn Abbott / Oh how quickly a summer can go by! I gained technical information and greater tolerance of others with different ideas.

You can help build the Center/The Center was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Capital Grant of $50,000 for our Coming Home: Building Our Future capital campaign to expand our home to better serve our community.We matched their award one-to-one with contributions from Center members and individuals who care about the arts. Thank you! In order to fully complete renovations we still need to raise an additional $200,000.We can only do this with your support. Please consider making a contribution to our future, and remember, all contributions are tax deductible to the full extent of the law.To receive material on our Coming Home capital renovations, please call the Center today.

-Kathleen Kenyon, PQ Editor

Judith Harold-Steinhauser, A.Z, 1997, 20"x 16", gelatin silver

_Kenrolzu:thephotographer who

Like a man who has gone through a shattering religious conversion, Kenro Izu has not been the same since he went to photograph the temples at Angkor in Cambodia four years ago.

Pre-Angkor, his life followed a set pattern. He photographed the very smalljewelry-for carriage-trade clients like Harry Winston and Asprey. And he photographed the immense-ancient stone monuments-for his noncommercial, "personal" work.After every trip abroad in his continuing search for meaning in the huge monuments created by human hand, he returned to his Manhattan studio and painstakingly made platinumpalladium prints of a select number of images. Every two years his latest prints were shown at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in SoHo and limited editions sold to collectors.

Post-Angkor, Izu still photographs expensive baubles for a living. He still travels to far-flung countries to photograph stone monuments. Last January he had a show at the Howard Greenberg Gallery.

offered for sale. All proceeds go to Friends Without a Border, a charitable organization set up in 1995 by Izu and a small circle of friends to raise money to build a children's hospital in Siem Reap, the city nearest to Angkor.

Before Angkor he had never been crazy about traveling, lzu says in his serene, spacious studio, mainly because he lugs around 300 pounds of camera equipment. But driven by his mission to make building the children's hospital a reality, hardly a month goes by when he isn't traveling to Cambodia or other parts of Asia: negotiating with the Cambodian Ministry of Health on hospital-

Angkor, he has lost "lots of ego" as well as a long-held "fantasy goal" to be successful. "It's a very strange thing," he marvels.

***

Kenro Izu's studio in the Chelsea section of Manhattan has a spectacular view of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. First-time visitors usually gasp when they see the spectacular view at dusk, but Izu hardly glances at what's outside his large loft windows. He is far too busy attending to the children's hospital project.

His images of Angkor, where gargantuan roots ripped into manmade temples, displayed an Kenro Izu, AHgkor#71, Ta Prohm. 1994 unusual ability to evoke two seemingly contradictory auras: a majestic stillness and an awesome energy. To produce the vibrant, lushly detailed prints, Izu has mastered both the large-format camera (its long exposures allowing for the capturing of details that would otherwise be lost in shadow) and the platinum-palladium process.

But post-Angkor, lzu has been focusing almost exclusively on Asia's Buddhist and Hindu temples. (Angkor began as a Hindu temple before it was converted to a Buddhist one by a later monarch.)

Post-Angkor, Izu doesn't produce limited editions of his Cambodian pictures. Neither will he profit from them.

At the January show, the 14 by 20 inch prints were offered at artist's cost, or $1,250 each, and they continue to be 4

related matters, attending fund-raising events in Japan and other Pacific rim countries, and hiring people to run the hospital project in Siem Reap.

Wanderlust is now in Izu's blood. He needs three weeks to get over his jet lag, one month to catch up, and then he gets "itchy," he says, eager to be on the road again. "When I travel," he says, "my spirit soars."

Pre-Angkor, he used to dislike heat and dust and humidity. Now, much to his own surprise, he finds himself relaxing when he reaches someplace that's hot and humid and there's no air conditioning.

Pre-Angkor, he never thought he would be spending his time raising money. He was, he says, the usual selfish artist hell-bent on success. Post-

Softspoken, slight of build and gracious to a fault, Izu is the • i sort of person who probably stays calm and focused when things go terribly wrong. Which is why he thinks nothing of taking a huge, customm ad e camera with him to places where the amenities are few and the going is tough. Preferring to work alone, he has never taken any of his assistants with him on µis photographic journeys. A local guide or driver hired for the day to help him carry his equipment is all the assistance he needs.

Izu keeps his weight a fighting-trim 125 pounds because he sees it as his "duty" to be sufficiently fit to haul all that camera equipment around. Given the subject he has chosen, he sometimes has to walk a mile or two to his destination, occasionally climbing a mountain or wading through water. Post-Angkor, it seems that he also keeps himself lean and fit to endure a punishing travel schedule on behalf of Friends Without a Border.

Given half a chance, Izu will talk with almost obsessive intensity about the children's hospital, which will actually be a medical facility offering free emergency services to anyone needing them.

·sawthelight

A year ago, he says, he approached Diana, the Princess of Wales, to be the honorary chairman of the board of Friends Without a Border. She had been campaigning against land mines; he specifically wanted a hospital near Angkor to help the young victims of the mines. (Cambodia has an estimated eight million of these time bombs, according to Friends Without a Border, not a few dating from World War II.)

Through an intermediary, Diana requested that more information be sent to her on Friends Without a Border. A package was delivered to her. "Early this year, I got a call from Diana's office at Kensington Palace," says Izu. "Her secretary said that that the Princess of Wales had already committed herself to a number of organizations and was not able to be our chair at this time, but she would like to be kept informed of our progress.And we kept her informed."

In late August, he recalls, he was flying from Tokyo to Bangkok to Cambodia when a television news program broke in to inform the pas-

Somehow, despite his packed schedule on behalf of Friends. Without a Border, Izu finds time to contit:me what he calls his "pilgrimage in photography." In the last year he has been .to India twice and he is counting on taking four or five more trips since India has an almost im 0 possibly large number of ancient Buddhist and Hindu monuments.

Izu has been entranced by the evolution of Buddhism in India and how it sometimes melded seamlessly into or coexisted peacefully with Hinduism. "They never fought each other," he says, "which I like." Last year, Izu also went to Java, Indonesia, to photograph Borobdur,

MARGARETTLOKE

tor and discovering a cure for a dread disease, his mother gave him a singlelens reflex camera to take pictures of bacteria through the microscope. But instead of going to medical school Izu headed for art school to study photography.

Intrigued by what he had read about New York as the mecca for photographers, Izu in 1971 decided to take a break from his studies and visit the fabled city. There, he became a longhaired member of the Woodstock generation, supporting himself by washing dishes in Japanese restaurants. But his pragmatic side quickly reasserted itself, and for three years he was immersed in the frenetic, pulsating fashion world, working as a photographer's assistant. It was not a job that was in tune with his psyche and, luckily, he found one that was: working in blessed calm and silence photographing jewelry.

sengers that Diana Kenro Izu, Borbudur #15, Indonesia, 1996 had been severely injured in a car crash. Later, Izu heard from his assistant in New York that she had died. :;>

Izu regrets the loss of a woman who campaigned so effectively against land mines. So far, Friends Without a Border has raised more than $200,000, with $80,000 derived from the sale of Izu's Angkor pictures.

A philanthropist in Japan has agreed to pay for the entire cost of building the hospital.And since this particular donor and his group of friends own eight hospitals in Japan, they would be able to send the necessary medical staff to manage the Cambodian hospital. What Izu has to do now is raise a total of $2 million to make sure that the hospital would be able to keep going for ten years.

the largest Buddhist stupa in the world, and its neighbor, Pram Banam, the world's largest Hindu temple.

After attending the groundbreaking ceremony for the children's hospital last November, he photographed the Buddhist temples in Laos. He is leaving the Buddhist temples of Japan for last, he says. He also hopes to take more photographs at Angkor. The last time he did any picture-taking there was in March 1996. He hopes to raise the number of his Angkor pictures from the current eighty plus to one hundred. It would, he says, help in his fundraising. Of course.

When Kenro Izu was fourteen or so, dreaming of someday becoming a doc-

At the Marcus estatejewelry company, Izu not only learned how to make small pieces of jewelry sparkle but he got rather good at it. When the regular photographer retired, Izu was asked to be the company's chief photographer. Soon, he was able to set up his own studio and to have clients like Harry Winston, Tiffany & Company and Cartier.

All well and good. Then he suddenly realized it was January 1979. "I was twenty-nine years and eight months old," he recalls. "I was facing the big three-oh." Even though he had come to New York with a mind to becoming a fine-art photographer, he was busily making a living that had little to do with art.

Not one to sit around and mope, he took his 4 by 5 view camera and went off to Egypt and its pyramids, which had fascinated him ever since he was a child. Of the thousands of pictures he took during a three-week trip only one-of the step pyramid in Sakkara-

"talked" to him. "So I had that picture on my studio wall for several months," he recalls, "just looking at it." Something he wanted was in the picture; he wasn't sure what it was.,

The photograph in question-a wonderfully textured image with an elegant layering of elements-set the pace for pictures to come. Looming above the pyramid is an indistinct wash of lowering sky. In sharp contrast to both are enigmatic rows of loose stones, crisply detailed, and, in the picture's foreground, sand resembling the ripples of a stream.

Izu was living with his wife in Woodstock then, his studio a half-hour away in Manhattan. He submitted the pyramid picture to the Center for Photography at Woodstock for an annual Photographer's Fund fellowship and was awarded $500 dollars. He also got a phone call from Howard Greenberg, then a private dealer in Woodstock who was also a foundq of the Center for Photography. He had seen Izu's pyra- • mid picture and he was interested in having him as an artist in the gallery he was about to open.

What was it about the pyramids, the Stonehenge in England, the Mayan ruins in Mexico, and all those other mammoth stone monuments around the world that so appealed to Izu?

tive that was the same size as his exhibition print, so that all he had to do was contact print -to put the negative directly on the photosensitive paper and expose to light.

Izu became even more anxious to get a super-large-format camera after he saw an 8 by 10 inch contact platinum print by Paul Strand at a Sotheby's auction preview. It had exactly the tones and the detailing that he had in mind. But he didn't know what a platinum print was. So he went back to the Center for Photography to take a workshop. Within two days he learned the basic platinum-palladium process, including the hand-coating of watercolor paper with platinum-palladium. It took him five more years to achieve the print quality he wanted.

Meanwhile he had received a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for

the ancient monuments, includes photographing flowers, fruits and the human torso. Like the stone monuments, they all share a promise of decay. But for the time being the massive root draped over an Angkor temple has the sinewed strength of a human torso, the human torso has the hidden energy of a landscape, and a pear has the solidity of a rock.

***

The places where Izu photographed many of his monuments were often quite poor: Egypt, the Middle East, or South America. He accepted that fact and had no qualms about making money from the sale of the pictures he took there.

But something happened after he began photographing at Angkor. Usually he goes to a location a few times and then he moves on to the next one. But he kept returning to Angkor.

Howard Greenberg kept asking him how many pictures he had. And he kept saying he wasn't ready. Usually twenty or thirty pictures would be enough for a show, but when he had fifty pictures and he told Greenberg he wasn't ready, Izu knew something was wrong.

Kenro Izu, Pramba,zam #5, Indonesia, 1996

"Stone itself has a sense of eternity and at the same time a sense of decay," he explains. "A huge boulder, by exposure to rain, starts to get eroded. It might take millions of years but eventually it turns into sand. Everything on earth goes back to the soil. Actually it's a Buddhist idea. Nothing is forever, everything is constantly changing."The whole idea, he says, gives him "such a peaceful feeling."

After he started photographing the ancient monuments, Izu began increasing the size of his negatives to get the kind of detailing and nuances he wanted. But he found that even with 8 by 10 inch negatives, once he enlarged the image for an exhibition-size print he lost an important detail - the mysterious density of air surrounding the monument. What he needed was a nega-

the Arts. He contacted Jack Deardorff, whose Chicago company was known for its large-format cameras, saying he had $10,000 to spend on a custom-made camera (the remaining $5,000 was for his monument project). He told Deardorff he wanted the largest possible negative in a camera that was light and small enough for him to manage on his own.

Deardorff devised a 14 by 20 camera that took a year to build. The camera itself weighs about fifty pounds but with the lens, tripod, film holder and other accessories the whole thing weighs in at around three hundred pounds at the airport.

Since the arrival of the Deardorff in 1983, Izu has been using it primarily for his personal work, which, in addition to

It was after his fifth trip to Angkor that he finally realized he didn't want to make any money from the pictures he had taken there. "I felt I was learning something that I wasn't learning before," he explains. "I learned how to share." He had to return something to Angkor.

- © Margarett Loke, 1997

MARGARETT LOKE, who lives in Manhattan, was formerly an assignment editor at The New York Times Magazine. She is a photography critic at the Times and also writes about photography for Artnews. She profiled Kenro Izu in her first "Inside Photography" column for the Times in June 1996.

All photographs copyright Kenro Izu, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery.

NewPhotography&DigitalImagery

pictureselectionby_JULIEGALANT

Jochen Brennecke

My work is part of my outer world [realty,physical presence, existence] = photographic image and a part of my inner world [thoughts, imagination, fantasies] = digital imaging.

Beth Edwards

My photographs are visual explorations of people, places, and things in middle-class suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area during this last decade of the 20th century. The color portraits are made in collaboration with girls, boys, men, and women of all ages. I'm trying to locate the place where the mythic intersects with the mundane, where dream merges with reality. Although I don't set out to make pretty pictures, it's important to me that this work be visually engaging. I want to start a conversation.

Judith Harold-Steinhauser

What interests me in these portraits is probing the territory between stability and instability. I seek a tension between known and unknown, order and chaos, exterior and interior.

Catherine Gfeller

Seeing the city itself as an immense collage-overlapping, transparent, incessantly in motion-Catherine Gfeller translates her experience of it through her own montages of photographic shards slivered from its facades.-Julia Ballerini, 1997 from Catherine Gfeller's Topographies catalog

IDavid Morgan Wright

"Wright's images are symbols mapping a universe which existed only in his mind. He left no dictionary to help interpret this visual language. Each viewer must decipher the mysterious iconography alone." -Robert

Edwards

Ann Ginsburgh Hofkin

What we "know," or "what we think we know," evolves over time in much the same way that a kaleidoscope shifts the elements of its design as we rotate the eyepiece again and again. My photography revolves around the fragility of life, the passage of time, the mystery of existence, and a sense of cherishing the precious.

7, 1995/96. infrared

Julie McConnell

This project adapts a newspaper image of Hillary Rodham Clinton's back which is then overlaid with quotes of her predecessors and placed into a landscape. How does one deal with "private" issues publicly? When are "private" issues a smoke screen? I create with my camera and computer; moving beyond what I can "capture" with them.

above: GraceGoodhueCoolidge,1929, 199;

LadybirdTaylorJob11so11,1963, 1995

Vincent Serbin

The nature of my exploration parallels scientific experimentation and research with aesthetic disciplines and various art forms, creating expression that is holistic and akin to what physicists refer to as the Theory of Everything.

Harriet Tannin

A memory from childhood: boys played stickball in the street and girls stayed on the curb weaving potholders.We "knew our place" back then.This memory is the emotional source for my current series.

AdeleBreth, l 990s, cut and woven gelatin silver prints

Lanny Webb

For me, things Southern are based on a devout respect and reverence for the land, a love of life, and a confirmed necessity for time to reflect. Quiet times and genteel relationships are perhaps by themselves inconsequential, but they create in unison the heart of our conscience. My images are born of these things as an attempt to rekindle the importance of this disappearing sentiment once native to the South.

Lanny Webb, The Pine Thicket, 1993, Iris print

Cece Wheeler

Spiritual encounters are not mystical events, they are moments of serendipity that bring us back to our original essence. Moments stop being conscious ... they become simply the way we count time passed and lives lived. By losing our ability to experience spiritual encounters, we lose the ability to live in an unlimited realm.

Nightgown, 1997,color thermal wax print

kimberly gremillion,

born in Chicago,Illinois,livesin Neartown, Texas.Her shadow-filledimagesof ballroom dancers,boxersin combat,circusperformers, and actorshavebeen featuredin exhibitionsat the Ricco/MarescaGalleryNYC,the Houston Centerfor Photography,the NeimanMarcus90th AnniversaryExhibition,and the Philadelphia PrintCenter.Her photographswere a highlight at the 1998FotoFestin Houston.Kimberlyhas been publishedin PhotoMetro magazineand won an awardfromthe prestigiousErnstHaas Internationalprint competition.

Light seeps through the dark curtain, giving only a hint as to what will emerge. Poised in the realm between darkness and light, my images reveal an unseen world. By traniforming the event into black and white, the drama qf the moment is enhanced.

Tbese images are metaphors for human feelings and actions. Tbe clown is every man. Behind his smile is sadness. Tbe couple embracing foreshadows con:flict, while the tightrope walker traverses a frail line in search of equilibrium.

Tbere are many archetypes hidden in the dark edges: the hoop of fire, the shadow of the spotlight, the solitary figure gazing through veiled p011al. Shadows convey aspects qf the indiscernible, evoking an emotional response to the viewer Thesefleeting images sh(/ifrom positive to negative space, creating rhythm and tension.

TheCenterSlideRegistryis a selectedslidearchiveof contemporaryimagesof photography,mixedmedia,anddigitalimagery.It providesa bridgebetweenartistscurators/collectors/andtheCenter,makingcontemporaryworkeasyto access-by appointment-Wednesdaythrough Sunday,noonto 5 pm.Artistswhowishto haveworkincludedin the RegistryshouldcontacttheCenterfor detailson thisspecialmembership opportunity.Fromthe Registrythe Centerstaffselectssoloexhibitionsandfeaturesexceptionalimagesin the Quarterly

·CriticalMonuments:ChristianViveros-Faune thephotographyofLuisMallo

Luis Mallo Reliquiarium

Now consider what would happen if their release from the chains and the healing of their unwisdom should come about in this way. Suppose one of them set free and forced suddenly to stand up, turn his head, and walk with eyes lifted to the light; all these movements would be painful, and he would be too dazzled to make out the objects whose shadows he had been used to see. What do you think he would say, if someone told him that what he had formerly seen was meaningless illusion, but now, being somewhat nearer to reality and turned towards more real objects, he was getting a truer view? Suppose further that he were shown the various objects being carried by and were made to say, in reply to questions, what each of them was. Would he not be perplexed and believe the objects now shown him to be not so real as what he formerly saw?

-Plato, The Republic

"Reliquiarium" Untitled No. I, 1996 (Luis Mallo pictures courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC)

Our best moments now are spent privately, constructing memory ...

We want to describe the indescribable: nature's instantaneous text. We have /,ost the art of describing the only reality whose structure I.ends itself to poetic representation: impulse, aims, oscillations.

-Osip Mandelstam, Entretiens sur Dante

History once paid its respects to mortality: The enduring honored the value of what was brief Graves and churches were a mark of such respect. They were instances which defied time and its effect on the individual, his diminution, that pathetic and eventual passage. Glimpses through a window, these openings looked across and into history, an opening and closing of time that nonetheless allowed for a singular momentary observation: in a word, the eternal.

With the eighteenth century the age of museums arrived at a blind gallop. The rate of historical change was soon understood through machine metaphors:first the railroad, then the automobile, eventually the airplane. Today what surrounds the individual life is apt to change much more quickly than the tiny moments of that life itself Compare the large number of public sculptures erected in the past with those of the last thirty years. The public notion of forever has receded and with it our sense of ourselves. Our best moments now are spent privately, constructing memory chiefly as snapshots of ourselves. These are our windows, referents, histories, our fragile eternals. Thousands of millions of snapshots shored against speeding historical time. When turned into art, they hold all times: They make us think.

"All those young photographers who are at work in the world;' Roland Barthes once wrote, "determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death." But Luis Mallo knows; he has come by this knowledge conscientiously. His work has long involved the sort of ruminations on the

His pictures serve as a lesson, a guid_e, almost an allegory for the seen and the unseen . ..

body and its extensions that facilitate such learning. Mallo's work has always depended-unlike much art photography, which is far too reliant on instantaneous and surface effects-on the good long look. His gift is a talent beyond technique; it involves contemplation, discipline, and the wisdom gained from serious study.

Mallo understands something basic about photography. This something goes beyond its capacity to register the real in pictures of landscapes, bodies, hands, statuary, and concerns a far more expressive power. That power is the power to stretch out the instant, to make his photographic subjects expressive within the field of their own ambiguity. In John Berger's words, Mallo gives reason for his photographs' expressiveness. In forcing them to contain meaning he unleashes from their stasis a flood of ideas, echoing in deed Andre Kertesz's speech: "The camera is my tool. Through it I give reason to everything around me."

Mallo's newest images, his reliquary, demand reasoning, interpretation, and an investigation of our notions of the sacred, especially of our secular notions of the sacred. Mainly taken inside the Gothic and Arms and Armor rooms of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the prints bristle with elegant challenge, confounding expectation, sense even. Like photographic equivalents of Francis Bacon's melting portraits, some of Mallo's pictures distort solid images into vertical lines of interior light, where columns and flat planes step from back to front to contain them like oppressive boxes. Figures appear and dissolve, blurring indistinctly into backgrounds of heavy shadow. Often times images are split, the effect of a mirroring trick and Mallo's strange use of focus and composition. Typically, Mallo will find greater value in the roughness of the joint made by two panes of glass than in the medieval madonna and child trapped behind a casing. The discomfiture caused by such an observation is immensely expressive; it upsets balances, offers enigmas, "Reliquiarium"

Mallo's images are a sort of Madame Tussaud's of the mind ...

endlessly queries perception.

The dilemma of perception is, in fact, the field Mallo mines deepest. His pictures serve as a lesson, a guide, almost an allegory for the seen and the unseen, what we tend to notice and what we don't.Throughout his reliquary of images Mallo plots out a progressive coming to terms with consciousness. From a pit of guesswork he leads us to more empirical observation as darkness recedes and fragments emerge into the light, nearly becoming things in themselves. Successive definition also matches an expanding awareness of place, a fact entirely legible in the serial quality of Mallo's photographs. If a first set of photographs captures a space akin to, say, Roman statuary seen through the eyes of Giorgio de Chirico or the stage set of an Alan Resnais film, another presents a perplexing version of the equally monumental museum space. One such photograph, showing a set of wall cases and their labels, tells us as much:The display appears from an oblique angle, the hand behind the camera still refusing to submit to a given order of things.

Mallo has gone so far as to call a group of his photographs by the title Inside the Cave, a direct reference to the sort of Platonism one suspects drives, whether overtly or not, much of this photographer's efforts. Mallo has referred to this group of photographs as a summary of this entire work. In their ascent from shadow into light, in their metaphorical movement away from that space where "there is no reality except those shadows of handmade things" to the light of the "good" and the "real," they appear to express in great measure the sense behind Mallo's Reliquiarium. But there we're made to look again. It is then that we notice the unnaturalness of the light in question, the obvious and telling fact that it emerges from the fake stained glass windows and arches that are part of the museum display.

And this is exactly how Mallo repeatedly confronts us with the reverse of what we think we see. Where we would

Mallo's photographs share a great deal with the images of loved ones carried to the side of the bed . .. ••

have statues and monuments, religious and architectural.shapes abound: plinths, torsos, stone feet, columns, museum walls. Our eyes roam among them uneasily, unsure of their value. Visions of the ancient, what we once understood as monumental, they work weirdly upon our mental registers.After some looking they become as historically counterfeit as figures in a wax museum. This is also part of their strength. Mallo's images of these dead museum treasures accrue with the power of the odd and the unexpected, often sending out deceptive resonances: a sort of Madame Tussaud's of the mind.

According to Barthes, "Death itself should be immortal:This was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of 'what has been; modern society has renounced the monument." But what of the monumental power of reminiscence allowed by photographs like those of Luis Mallo's Reliquiarium? Their achievement encourages a lifetime of looking, these are images "which produce death while trying to preserve life:: In truth, Mallo's photographs share a great deal with the images of loved ones carried to the side of the bed: they try to recreate experience, an area of timelessness, insisting on the permanent. But in a prolonged instant Luis Mallo's images do much more: They create a duration of meaning, mute evidence against forgetting that we are indeed required to interpret our world. -Christian Viveros-Faune, 1998

CHRISTIAN VIVEROS-FAUNE is a New York City based writer and curator. He has published in, among other publications., Art Nexus (Columbia); Frieze IJ].K.)-;,rLapiz(Spain); TRANS (NYC); El Mercurio, Suplemento de Artes y Letras (Chile); and zingmagazine (NYC). He is co-curator of Ricorsi: Utopia, Dystopia, Postmodernism, at Roebling Hall, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Fall/Spring 1999

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Sunday August 16

SUMMERAIR

Work by the 1998 v,isiting faculty including work by Sam Abell, Sally Apfelbaum, Lillian Bassman, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Ben Caswell, Bruce Davidson,Wendy Eric son, Robert Farber,James Fee, Donna Ferrato, Chuck Kelton, Mark Klett,An Lovett, Mary Ellen Mark, Raymond Meier, Andrea Modica, John Placko, Martin Silverman,Joyce Tenneson, Theo Westenberger. ENCHANTEDVISIONS

Work by national Woodstoc PliotographyWorkshop Participants.

Sunday, August 30

Sunday, October 11

A FEMININEREGARD I CURATORPETERHAYHALPERT

Who are the new and emerging women in the field photographing • ' fashion and why are they still in a minority?

SOLO:LUISMALLO/"RELIQUARIUM"

"A series of new wor hich radically distorts the actual arrangement of interior space - in confronting the ability to dissect the physical distribution of objects, the subject of these photographic compositions is able to detach its 1ffrom the conventional proportions in which it has been placed -arriving at a form of cathartic realization." -LM

Sunday, October 25-Sunday, December 20

OUTSIDERS:WOMEN LA D CAPEPHOTOGRAPHERS I CURATORMARAJAYNEMILLER

Artists include: SALLYAPFELBAUM,KATHLEENLARKIN,ELAINEQUERRY, ELENETREMBLAY,CAREYYOUNG.HORIZONSOFLANGUAGEI Curated by Pip Day. Artists include LINDAPOST, LAURASTEIN,NANCY GOLDEN,EDIWINOGRADE,CELIAAYNETO.

SOLO:SARAHGREERMECKLEM I TAKINGTIME

2 and 3-D installation with photographs, painting, drawing, collage, and text. Born in Kingston, NY,she spen,t her early years in Woodstock and creates installation work such as the Oi.JerlookMountain House project, investigating historical buildings and contemporary environmental issues.