Photography, which over the past 30 years has transformed contemporary art and artmaking, is itself undergoing profound changes as a result of today's digital revolution.
That's the general idea behind The Pencil of Nature in Our Digital Age: Photoimagery in Recent Art, an ambitious show at School 33 Art Center that seems timed to complement the opening next week of two major photography exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The show's title comes from a phrase coined by English photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the negative-positive process, who likened photography to "drawing with light." The School 33 show picks up on that idea to explore how contemporary artists are using photographic imagery and practices to extend the expressive range of traditional artistic media.
Some of the works, like Bernhard Hildebrandt's large paired images, combine photography and painting. Hildebrandt creates a painting, usually abstract, then photographs it and presents the two images side by side on the wall.
The effect is similar to seeing the twin, but not identical, views of a subject in a 19th-century stereoscope. Yet, curiously, the photograph, because of its shinier surface, often looks more "real" than the painting it depicts. Thus the artist confounds the common-sense opposition between an "original" and its "copy."
Margaret Paris' photographs of the Mississippi River are as much about photographic processes as they are about the appearance of America's most famous waterway. Paris starts with black-and-white slide images, which she transfers onto Polaroid film. Then she scans the Polaroid images into a computer and prints them out on archival paper.
Despite such high-tech wizardry, Paris' images, several of which are sepia-tinted, have a nostalgic, 19th-century aura, as if the artist wished to reclaim the fabled river of Mark Twain rather than its current dismal morass of floating oil drums, smoking refineries and riverboat casinos.
Pencil runs through Dec. 6. Other artists in the show are Bruce McKaig, Ted Leigh, Daithi O'Glaisain, David Douglas and Wesley Kline. School 33 is at 1427 Light St. Hours are 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Call 410-396-4641.
Our elders
Local photographer Linda Day Clark takes pictures of the people who live in her neighborhood along West North Avenue, an inner-city community she likens to an African village.
Despite the often distressed character of urban life, Clark's work is remarkably sunny and open-hearted, which is why it's worthwhile to make a trip to Washington, where the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Museum of African-American History and Culture has mounted a lovely exhibition of her work.
In the Arms of Our Elders is a group show that brings together half a dozen photographers around the theme of honoring the experience and wisdom that often comes with advancing age. Clark's large, digitally printed color photographs of neighborhood seniors are straightforward portraits that present their subjects respectfully and with obvious affection.
Despite their being in color, these pictures are definitely documentary in orientation, and like most documentary photographers who choose to work in color rather than in time-honored black-and-white, Clark mostly has had to make up her aesthetic as she goes along. Her success is evidenced by lots of harmonious, warm colors and muted tonal contrasts that make her pictures seem to glow on the wall.
This work has a lyrical, folkloric quality that reflects the artist's deep commitment to her subjects' essential humanity as well as her recognition of the difficult path African-Americans often have had to trod in order to claim their full rights as citizens. Clark's photographs of people who have weathered many storms during their time suggest that whatever obstacles and setbacks fate may offer, life is still sweet.
The Anacostia Museum is at 1901 Fort Place S.E., in Washington. Admission is free. For information about hours and directions call 202-357-2700.
A 19th-century air
J.D. Talasek's black-and-white male and female nudes at Fleckenstein Gallery in Towson also have a vaguely 19th-century air despite their up-to-the-minute contemporary settings.
Talasek uses a large-format view camera equipped with swings and tilts that allow him to vary the degree of sharpness over different areas of the image independently of each other. In many of his pictures he uses these techniques of variable focus to radically restructure the contours of the human body.
Most of the figures are presented against a dark background illuminated by a single light source, so that bodies seem to emerge out a void or a womb. Some of the photographs depict more than one figure, but the contorted poses, ambiguous focus and uncertain light often make it difficult to decide exactly what part of the body one is looking at.
Talasek's work bears a certain resemblance to that of the English photographer Bill Brandt, who, in the 1950s, created highly stylized abstract nudes using a fish-eye wide angle lens. It also recalls recent work by Baltimore photographer Connie Imboden, who exploits the light-bending properties of water to refashion the structure of the body in novel, sometimes disturbing ways.
Brandt, Imboden and Talasek all stretch the modern aesthetic of so-called "straight photography" - hard-edged, unmanipulated images produced by purely photographic means. Yet in Talasek's case the effect is strangely backward-looking, rather than forward-looking, possibly because his images so powerfully recall the inherent lack of sharpness of early photographic lenses or the dreamy, deliberately fuzzy effects of 19th-century pictorialist photography.
Still, Talasek may be on to something. Photography offers completely new ways of envisioning the body, and these photographs suggest a promising alternative to realist convention.
The show runs through Nov. 30. The gallery is at 29 Allegheny Ave.; hours are Tuesday-Friday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Call 410-296-8588.