The views aren’t straightforward, but the work is

By Mark Jenkins
Friday, Aug. 12, 2011

Like other modern technologies, photography outgrows specific methods quickly. The glass ambrotype had a run of only about 15 years, and was largely abandoned by the mid-1860s. But the first two pieces in "Photo 11," a group show at Rosslyn's Artisphere, are glass ambrotypes, made by Daniel Afzal in 2010. In the context of this exhibition, with its digital and inkjet prints, Afzal's portraits appear archaic. Yet there's something contemporary about them, which they share with other images in this grouping.

With their soft focus and milky texture, Afzal's pictures appear to have been plucked from the past. But their subjects, identified as Andrea and Ena, don't gaze earnestly into the lens, the way people did in photography's early days. The girls look away, as if not entirely prepared to cooperate. In an age when people are photographed frequently - even incessantly - the subject is no longer required to engage the camera.

There are few portraits among these 47 images, which were selected by former Corcoran Gallery associate curator Amanda Maddox. But there are a lot of sideways glances, attempts to capture life without formality and on the sly. In a curious sub-theme, three of the 18 photographers present glimpses from moving trains: Stacy Evans shoots individual, everyday scenes; Sandra Rottman does diptychs of industrial sites; and Robert Bocci presents the northern Italian countryside in a sort of film strip, each frame with a silhouetted passenger in the foreground. The ultimate in offhand looks, these one-time-only pictures submit to the moment, and accept the locomotive's movement as a collaborator.

In a sense, the show is strong on portraiture, but it's of places, not people. D.B. Stovall offers big, bold, straight-on views of small-town buildings, Michael Borek inspects interiors of a Scranton factory and Mark Parascandola takes the long view of modern-day Mediterranean-style structures arrayed on hillsides. Two pictures from Barbara Johnson's "Eastern Market Series" depict single figures, their solitariness emphasized by anonymous gray and tan backdrops. More typical, however, are Lorne Peterson's "Antigueno Street," in which a person is represented by just a shadow, and cloud observer Helen Glazer's "A Plane Full of People Passed by," in which only vapor remains.

Catherine Day's "Curtain" is printed on fabric and hung on a rod, and Arista Slater-Sandoval's work (also on fabric) montages repeated images, Warhol-style. But most of this work is realistic, without heavy conceptual baggage. Near-abstract elements, like the out-of-focus street light in Evans's "Woman Walking," merely serve to highlight the overall sense of authenticity. If many of the participants in "Photo 11" eyeball the world from oblique angles, the resulting work is nonetheless straightforward.

Rebecca Sampson, one of seven young photographers shown in "Gute Aussichten: New German Photography," also depicts people who look away from the camera. But there's nothing spontaneous about her work, which focuses on people with eating disorders. Her images are made in commonplace locations, yet feel stagey and a little stiff. That's characteristic of this mainly solemn show, whose most playful (and colorful) work is Samuel Henne's formal portraiture of assemblages of everyday objects. Backed by blocks of pink, yellow or green, these coolly absurd pictures are half Dada, half kitchen-gadget spreads from Real Simple magazine.

The Goethe-Institut exhibition, which presents all but one of the winners of Germany's 2010-11 annual graduate photography competition, reveals an academic taste for the sober and the conceptual. Some of that preference reflects Europe's grim 20th-century history. The pictures in Helena Schatzle's series, "The Time In-Between - 2621 KM Memory," revisit her grandfather's 1946 escape from a Russian POW camp; small portraits of now-elderly eyewitnesses are overwhelmed by large images of gray-skied Romanian industrial landscapes.

The big-versus-small format is also key to Andre Hemstedt and Tine Reimer's portraits, in which expressionless young people seem to audition for a place on a Kraftwerk album cover, and color aspires to black-and-white. The latter tendency is pushed to abstraction in Stephen Tillmans' "Luminant Point Arrays," which capture the patterns made by CRT televisions at the instant they're switched off. These pictures, with their deep blacks and bluish and pinkish whites, are real images of artificial phenomena, and are mounted under heavy glass to more closely resemble TV sets. Clever and impeccably realized, Tillmans' photos are coldly beautiful, but reductive to a fault.

As digital photography burgeoned, the death of Kodak's best-loved color film was inevitable. To longtime users' chagrin, the last roll of Kodachrome was developed in January of this year. "Kodachrome," at Glen Echo Park's Photoworks gallery, is a wake for the color film professional photographers consider the sharpest ever made. Naturally, it's a brightly hued one.

The first photo in the exhibition shows what Kodachrome could do: Frank van Riper's "Uptown" is a long-exposure, sharply angled shot of the cinema's marquee, whose glow seems to be turning the whole world red. Other pictures showcase vivid blue skies, a goldfish in a plush white casket, dark green cactus fronds in front of a bright red trailer and - in the closest thing to an abstract image - a slash of red in one of Michael Horsley's close-ups of the Joyce Motors garage.

Not all these images are labeled with dates, but they reach back at least as far as 1967. Many were taken overseas, with Paris and Moscow - not among the world's more sunlight-dappled cities - the most frequent international climes. Joanne Miller's "St. Basil's Cathedral" views the illuminated, onion-domed Moscow landmark at night and in the deep background, framed through a window. This witty composition reveals that Kodachrome was as well suited to chiaroscuro as to vivid primary colors.