Atlanta Journal Constitution April 2007
VISUAL ARTS: A twist on convention
Photographers\\ eye for offbeat beauty obvious in landscapes
By Jerry Cullum
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/01/2007
REVIEW
Verdict: An excellent look at some insufficiently known photographers.
Composition Gallery chose to celebrate its first year of operation by asking Atlanta scholar, curator and consultant Susan Todd-Raque to jury a show featuring the work of five well-chosen photographers.
The exhibition she assembled takes the gallery in the direction of landscape, while retaining some of the original focus on people and urban places.
As you would expect, none of the work is purely conventional, but all of it is elegant and some of it quite beautiful.
Washington, D.C., photographer Robin Perry Dana\\s large photographs of the kaolin pits of central Georgia, for example, are luminously lovely studies in muted color, in which plants growing in clay-stained water recall the look of Chinese landscape painting. The extraordinary beauty of a potentially repellent subject is a reminder of how skilled a photographer Dana is and how unfortunate it is that her work wasn\t more widely exhibited during her years in Georgia.
Laura Griffin\s soberly haunting color studies capture moments that are hard to interpret, even after knowing the title. "Wedding," for example, is a close-up of the legs of a formally attired man seated on a bed. "White Christmas" shows the tips of artificial Christmas trees shot from an unusual angle. As in all of Griffin\s work, the relationship of an image\\\\s various elements to one another is as important as the subject matter.
Diane Kirkland\s black-and-white images of unchanged natural habitats of Georgia have recently been featured in the photography journal Lenswork, but her work remains insufficiently known locally.
The photos Todd-Raque has chosen don\\t always go for the typical approach to the topic, even though they show kinship with a whole tradition. The formal geometry of "Grass and Leaves" is an outstanding example of the kinship. Her individual approach is best illustrated by her study of "Mount Arabia, Ga." —- pools of water on rock, with a storm gathering overhead.
Mary Ann Mitchell\\s soft-focus photos of the New York subway bring an imaginative approach to a well-documented subject, and her nightscape of the city is a reinvention of yet another scene that has charmed thousands of photographers. It\\s significant that these three photos don\\t bring to mind any particular predecessors.
The same goes for Jenni Elbaum\\s scenes of the London Underground, in which the feeling conveyed by the blurriness is far more chaotic. Elbaum wanted to capture the sense of being in a new place far away from family, and she succeeds in bringing a sense of strangeness to a much-photographed city in which the taxicabs have classic shapes and the streets bear lettering on the asphalt reading "LOOK RIGHT," with an arrow to reinforce the lesson.
