‘Pictures of My Dreams’
Two longtime Taos artists offer delectable new collections of their photographs
‘ON BEAUTY’ Photographs by Lenny Foster, Poems by J.M. White
Anomolaic Press (2021, 112 pp.)
“My task is to be aware, to humbly accept whatever chance encounter the day brings and to literally make something out of it,” visual artist Lenny Foster writes.
Capturing the startling detail of the moment — a grizzled old cowhand resting in the sun, his head bowed under his brimmed hat, hands resting in his lap; a young woman in a somber room pausing, Vermeeresque, before a window shedding light; the delineated wingspan of a stork, suddenly taking flight above a
seascape; a red beaded pendant knotted at the nape of an African woman in headdress — Foster’s photographs render the mundane almost holy.
In his new collection on display are still imponderable moments, like resting hands Foster is so skillful at presenting, shots of people literally praying (aged hands holding a Bible; bare
feet emerging from a figure face-down in prayer before an altar; a woman in profile, eyes closed and seated in what
looks like a church, illuminated only by the celestial glow from a window). Other black-and-white images of stark
Southwestern nature emerge, flowers with pale, soft petals opening prayerfully
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to the viewer, the knowing eye of a speckled horse gazing at us with uncanny wisdom — all quietly and peacefully majestic.
In contrast, poet and philosopher White (“Future Nothingness Already,” “The Beyond Within”), whose work accompanies each photo on the facing
page, unfurls relentless definition, as if trying to get at what exactly “beauty”
means without quite pinpointing it: “beauty is an opening/to the oneness
in all things”; “the attractiveness of beauty/stirs the aesthetic sensibility”; “the elegance of beauty/has an intimate
spontaneity”; “beauty is experience refined,” and so on. Seems a lot of “psychopomp” (White’s word) for what
Foster’s images capture as essentially a vitality, vulnerability, urgency, connection, liberation — also White’s words.
Accompanying Foster’s photograph of a snowbound San Francisco de Asís Church in Ranchos — a flock of what might be crows fluttering about its
placid, age-old adobe exterior — is this wondrous thought: “beauty evokes the enchantment/that reaches beyond
the particular/to the liberating force/ of what is general in each/and com
mon to all/forging a union … finding a nobler clay.”
Taoseños know Foster as the owner of the Living Light Photography Gallery from 1998-2016, and author of the books “Healing Hands” (2013), “Enchanted Land” (2016) and “Winter Retreat at Mabel’s” (2017), featuring his photography as well as his inspired haiku. Originally from Washington,
D.C., Foster has since moved from Taos to St. Augustine, Fla., to be closer to his parents.
Foster will be showing his “Six Magnolias” photographs at Magpie gallery, 218 Paseo del Pueblo Norte — opening
reception is Saturday (April 23) from 3-5 p.m.
‘SPIRIT IN FORM:
THE HUMAN FORM IN NATURE AND OTHER PLACES’
By Gail Russell (2021, 69 pp.)
Russell, longtime Taos painter and printmaker, first started experimenting with a 35mm Nikkormat in the late
sixties while working with fashion photographer Richard Davis in New York City. She was trying out techniques
that manipulated images resulting in “divine accidents” — masking, dodging, sandwiching, solarizing, as she describes her work with Jerry Uelsmann — techniques that were frowned
upon at SUNY, where she later taught. At the time everything “was done meticulously in the darkroom.”
“I wanted to make pictures of my dreams,” Russell writes.
In this collection of her work from 1968 to 2002, she showcases some of those “dances with creativity” — startling, straightforward photographs involving the human body, male and
female nudes, situated in natural settings, as well as in unrestricted spaces
like bathtubs and bedrooms — joyous, free, enigmatic, somewhat surreal images with the help of eagle wings, mirrors and double exposures.
Moreover, she injects some of her lyrical writing into the work, and, unlike White’s more academic musings accompanying Foster’s photographs, these are sensual, ecstatic phrases that
seem to glide organically amid the natural images:
“We are
smooth cool stones
Rivers running
warm living flesh strength… liquid taste gold… wet delicious salt cream us.”
Russell will be hosting an open studio/open house in honor of Earth Day this weekend, April 23-24, in collaboration with the Farm House Café, from noon to 5 p.m., at North Star Plaza, 65 RT 522 Suite 4A, El Prado. Call 575-7701507.