Art review
The eyes of Columbia photographers
Exhibit at Slayton House features closeup work in nature by area lensmen
The Columbia Photo Artists often like to get up close to their subjects. Your attention is called to details that you otherwise might not notice in a group exhibit titled “Through Our Eyes” at the Bernice Kish Gallery at Slayton House.
The eyes in question belong to photographers Dennis Gilbert, Jerry Gettleman, Tim Ambrose, Jerry Weinstein, Harriet Rosenberg, Bruce Blum, David Zeitzer and Joan Forester.
Examples of getting close to nature include Jerry Weinstein's “Tiger Swallowtail,” in which you can examine this butterfly's black and yellow wings as it hovers over eight white daisies.
Weinstein also has a tightly framed shot of a “Wilde Lake Eagle” whose spread wings are dramatically set against an intensely blue sky. It's neat to think that this national symbol was photographed not far from the art gallery where you're now looking at its photo.
And Weinstein's “Clematis” makes you appreciate how all of a single flower's purple petals extend outward from a white center.
Dennis Gilbert's “Rose with Wide Petal” gives you a real sense of a single flower's form and color, and the blurry background ensures that your eyes remain fixed on that rose.
Other photographers get close to machinery and other examples of our industrial output. These are things that ordinarily you would not be examining so intently.
Joan Forester's “The Winch” depicts metal gears that seem capable of heavy work at a seaside dock and her “Chassis, Budd Car” has so many coiling and circular metal shapes that it almost seems like an abstract sculpture rather than a closely cropped view of a car's anatomy.
Bruce Blum's “No. 305” puts you right up against what appears to be a vintage train and his “Gears” presents metal parts that are darkly gleaming and somewhat mysterious. Similarly, his “Wheel” is a familiar object, to be sure, but seeing it so close up makes you contemplate the beauty of its spokes-within-a-circle construction.
Other photographers in the show go the opposite route and get some distance from their subjects.
Gilbert's “Farm, Howard County, MD” draws your attention to a very large field and then prompts you to follow a fence running deep into a rural scene before you finally see a barn way off in the distance.
Tim Ambrose's “Oh Canada” is a panoramic landscape shot in which a forested hillside has enough bits of yellow and orange to let you know that our neighbor to the north is shown as it heads into autumn.
Jerry Gettleman has a series of “Western Abstracts” in which the west still seems pretty wild, as do some of the colors found in what we tend to think of as a monochromatic place. And for a burst of color in the wilderness, have a look at David Zeitzer's “Canyon Rainbow.”
Yet other photographers are interested in capturing shadows and reflections. This is a matter of photographing the subject under just the right atmospheric conditions.
In Harriet Rosenberg's “Solomons MD,” docked boats cast shadows into the water. A much more massive shadow is cast by an ice shelf in Zeitzer's “Antarctica.” That imposing shadow falls onto calm water, reinforcing the sense of majestic stillness. Shadows also cast a meditative spell in Zeitzer's “Nets,” which casts a shadow against water photographed under twilight conditions.
That silhouetted appearance of the main subject matter is shared by Gilbert's “Looking Skyward,” in which three silhouetted people point up to a pink-and-purple, sunset sky. You'll be looking too.
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