Perspectives: Two exhibitions in Sag Harbor

Even as local East End scenes predominate in one exhibition at Sag Harbor’s Winter Tree Gallery, just across the street at the Tulla Booth Gallery are photographs for those seeking more international and exotic visions (although in some of the locales featured in this exhibit, one could assume that images of the Hamptons would be equally as mysterious and alien as these far flung locales seem to East End viewers).

The Tulla Booth exhibit, titled “Gallery Favorites,” consists in many cases of distinctly unforgettable images, memorable in no small part for the quality and iconographic nature of some of the works, as well as for the fact that, taken from the gallery’s permanent collection, some have been exhibited a number of times before.

Nevertheless, of particular interest are pieces by the late Burt Glinn, a photographer whose most affecting work derived from his efforts as a noted international photojournalist, but who also established a reputation as chronicler of celebrity icons such as Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Warhol (featured in a work here posing with his then-starlet Edie Sedgwick).

But it is his haunting portrait of the 1960s supermodel, Twiggy, that is of interest due to Mr. Glinn’s powerfully assertive yet delicate balance between light and dark, eloquent in its reflection of the subject’s childlike vulnerabilities, which were often submerged behind the glamour of her celebrity status.

The image offers one of those moments in portrait photography when the mask has slipped and, for that brief moment, one can see behind the pretense and the masquerade of a private life lived in public.

Interestingly, a certain air of vulnerability also emerges from Steve McCurry’s image of a young Nepalese woman emerging from a river after bathing. In capturing a moment both private and public, the photographer has established an atmosphere that is both charmingly innocent and more than a little voyeuristically erotic, as the subject unself-consciously adjusts her wet sarong, gossamer in its transparency and revealing significantly more than one might expect to find in polite Nepalese society.

The mystery of Jane Martin’s images, on the other hand, seems less associated with any visions of foreign lands and more the result of atmospherically charged landscapes, in which nude figures are seen in the midst of thick banks of fog in a choreography of cinematic surrealism.

Entertainingly, there is also a similar sensation present in Ross Munro’s underwater photographs, which are compositionally structured to accentuate the languid choreography of bodies in slow motion.

Also featured in the exhibition at the Tulla Booth Gallery, which runs through November 24, are Bruno Barbey and Blair Seagram.

Meanwhile, for those who are more comfortable with images of East End views, the Winter Tree Gallery is currently featuring recent works by Barbara Hadden and Terry Lewis, most of which center on elements of life on the East End.

Ms. Hadden works in what might be described as a sort of mise en scene approach, so that the images seem to exist less as a space on the wall than as an object that is defined by its existential physicality. This effect is particularly notable in her landscape work, which, in its dramatic use of light and colors, develops a sense of both depth and place, with the viewers themselves 
become a part of the image being viewed.

This is also apparent in Ms. Hadden’s more architecturally focused paintings, featuring external views of rather well-known structures, such as Sag Harbor’s Historical Society and Bridgehampton’s Candy Kitchen, that strive, even in their stark realism, for an emotional portrait rather than just a physical one.

At the same time, Ms. Hadden’s work becomes more engaging in two works, “Daffodil” and “Bread Pudding” (both oil on canvas), that reverse the placement of the viewer from inside to outside, using architectonic aspects in their compositional framing but nevertheless maintaining focus on the natural world outside.

Also featured are paintings by Terry Winters that filters elements of the East End through a distinctly American primitive motif. Of special note is the work “Route 27” which somehow imparts a certain whimsicality in its contrast of a line of cars in an East End traffic jam with the farm fields that stretch into the distance.

The current exhibition at the Winter Tree Gallery in Sag Harbor continues through December 1.