Group Photo Show Review At Tulla Booth

In the current exhibition at Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor, perhaps the greatest impact for the viewer arises from the recognition of how photography has changed and evolved as technology has liberated the medium from the tedium of merely serving as a representational tool.

No longer merely allowing the expression of the obvious, it has over the years become a powerful instrument of artistic expression in its abilities to allow the photographer to create a myriad of concurrent narratives that can be, by turns, both mysteriously painterly and jarringly specific in their replication of reality and detail. Cameras are not, as the late watercolor painter Walter Phillips caustically commented, “instruments of exaggeration and belittlement” but instead now more accurately reflect Paul Gauguin’s prediction that photography would “soon be the ultimate in truth.”

This truth is not, however, interpreted absent the influence of an artist’s unique perspective, as is particularly evident in the nature photographs of Lynn Geesaman, who seems as interested in investigating the psychological aspects of nature as its more overt physical manifestations.

Displaying strikingly private and dreamlike compositions that highlight both natures’ elemental energy as well as humankind’s ostensible mastery of it, Ms. Geesaman is able to use the specificity of the lens to conjure painterly vistas that are fraught with mystery and emotional ambiguity. This is accomplished through her use of a subtle though insistent luminescent glow that permeates the works, enhancing her use of color and form while imbuing the photographs with an impressionistic sensibility that imparts a feeling of calm placidity shadowed by a balancing sensation of tension and inscrutability.

In “Certosa di Pontignano, Italy” (chromagenic print, 2000), for example, the manicured structure of an arbor-covered path in a formal garden offers evidence of nature’s subservience to man’s authority—even as the tangle of vines that frame the pathway illustrate a natural rhythmic cacophony while her use of color evokes a vibrant and uncontrolled sense of movement and energy.

Movement and energy are also important components in Blair Seagram’s panorama photographs of ocean waves and surfers. Although, where Ms. Geesaman cloaks her view of the environment in painterly tones, Ms. Seagram uses sharp focus and the wide format to broadly expand the field of view and specifically elicit the majestic and raw power of the natural world.

Equally as important to the picture however is Ms. Seagram’s use of multiple sequenced images to reconfigure reality itself and thereby impose the artist’s hand on the final product. This is accomplished in a manner that avoids an overt sense of repetition within the works, thereby making the scene feel legitimate rather than contrived and underscoring the feeling of force imparted by the roiled surf and breaking waves.

Steve McCurry, on the other hand, approaches the picture as an unadulterated moment of reality in which the narrative is dictated by the vagaries of chance in the configuration and the formation of images that make up the final product. At the same time, he is able to impart a dynamically cinematic sensibility to the works that propels the narrative beyond that which is immediately apparent and creates questions that arise from that which the viewer cannot necessarily see. The moment itself becomes significant but its importance is accentuated by the mysteries and possibilities of what is left unseen and unstated.

This cinematic quality is also true of Bruno Barbey, whose works such as “Meknes” (pigmented ink print) makes powerful use of color and pattern to conjure an image that is dynamically evocative. But his images also reflect an extremely subtle use of emotion to psychologically structure the scene.

The current group exhibition of photographs at Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor continues through the middle of January.