At the Griffin: ‘Atelier,’ ‘Rolls & Tubes,’ and picturing an Einsteinian equation
WINCHESTER — The Griffin Museum of Photography describes its Photography Atelier as “a portfolio and career building course for emerging to advanced photographers.” Taught by Jennifer McClure and Emily Belz, the latest iteration started last fall and concluded this spring.
“Photography Atelier 37” includes the work of 20 participants. Like the two other shows currently up at the Griffin, it runs through July 9.
Certain themes recur: identity, nature, the nature of looking. Frank Curran’s views of display windows, storefronts, and reflections would be the most notable instance of that last category. The sight of several eyeglasses that seem to be floating in space in “Illusion” manages to be sedate and wild at the same time. The same description applies to “Portal,” which offers an oblique view of an elevator interior . . . or is it something else?
Two photographers have in common a more unusual theme. Call it urban mystery. As seen in the work of Tony Attardo and Judith Donath, it’s striking and memorable.
None of Attardo’s photographs, all taken at night in small New Hampshire cities and towns, have people in them. But the weight of human presence is almost overwhelming. Space and light contribute to the sense of mystery; but what defines it is that interplay between ostensible absence and felt presence.
Donath describes her photographs in “Atelier” as “a meditation on the varieties of urban solitude.” Taken in Boston and Cambridge between last September and this March, they have the hard, revelatory light of Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s work.
There’s nothing urban about Margaret Lampert’s three “Atelier” photographs. They relate to the dairy farm she grew up on north of Boston. There’s a lot that’s mysterious, though. Try to get those headlights from “Argilla Road” out of your head, not that you’d necessarily want to. Is the car they belong to coming from or heading toward?
David Brown takes as his subject cemeteries. Specifically, it’s the offerings people leave at them. Those offerings provide a kind of link between the living and once-living. Sometimes they’re funny (a plastic Santa Claus?). Sometimes they’re moving. Sometimes they’re both. Sometimes they’re both and also borderline inexplicable. That’s the case with “Fastball on the Outside Corner,” which shows a cap, a fielder’s glove, and baseballs lying against a gravestone. The bit of letter visible on the cap isn’t a Chicago C. Still, the image makes one think of Steve Goodman’s “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.”
The Rolls & Tubes Collective consists of four Bay Area photographers: Colleen Mullins, Christy McDonald, Jenny Sampson, and Nicole White. The rolls and tubes in question refer to toilet paper. What the members of the collective do is restage various images from photographic history, some more famous than others, employing, yes, toilet paper as an element in each.
It’s a pretty funny idea, no? McDonald’s reworking of Robert Frank’s “Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey” substitutes what appear to be giant economy size packages of toilet paper for the mysterious figures seen in Frank’s photograph.
Other examples are comparably amusing. But with 32 images on display, the joke starts to get a little tired. In one instance, it borders on offensive. That would be McDonald’s take-off on Josef Koudelka’s indelible and heartbreaking image of Prague’s Wenceslas Square, deserted in August 1968 during the Soviet invasion. Yes, the new version is clever, substituting San Francisco for Prague, but that cleverness just makes things worse. Ho, ho, ho? No, no, no.
For “E=mc²,” Fern Nesson takes as her point of departure Einstein’s equation for relativity. “My non-representational, abstract photographs are neither staged nor lit artificially,” she writes. “All are reality-based.” There are 10 still images in the show, and three videos, though maybe videos isn’t quite the right word. Yet the images do move (which sounds like Galileo, doesn’t it?). The odd thing is, if you look at Nesson’s website, at www.fernlnesson.com/ emc2-1, the images seem far more impressive than they do at the Griffin. Their imperious chill feels almost alluring. Is one format more “real” than the other? Does screen suit these images better than wall? It’s a puzzle.