Fact and Figure

ONE PARTICULAR IMAGE stays in my mind after looking at this show of work by one of the best photographers around Harvard right now. Its a cylindrical ash container outside some office elevator, door. The shape is lit-clean, and glows there in the middle of the picture like some future's icon to insignificance.

Not to load a poor ash tray too full, but the kind of contained glow that radiates in this photograph, and the similar "charging" of the matter of fact that happens in a lot of Alex Webb's photographs is a good model for what photography can do best. There is an outsider's distance, even arrogance, here that picks its images intelligently and admits the choosing straight-forwardly, just by seeming so plain.

The subjects fall into three rough groups: a series about Cambridge high school kids, horsing around, lounging outside the drug store, sitting at home. A second set mixes moments from New York streets and parks. The latest is a group of views of Boston offices, with secretaries, office machines, empty corridors. All the pictures are 35 mm., full-frame prints. Most have a firm horizon, and a depth that, especially in the case of the office photos, is constructed with wonderful strength.

More accurately, of course, the subjects are the moments lodged inside: a little girl's miraculous imbalance preserved, the emotion of a head blurred in the middle of an embrace.

These things only get beyond their usualness by being caught so precisely and spontaneously to begin with. There is a clear effort to avoid the freak image, wailing for attention. Because the camera asserts its simple means, the slight twist of a wide angle lens, for instance, is able to take hold of its subject with all the more force, and draw together spaces separated by a wall or pillar into a new single sense.

People are often small and tucked into the corners, but in a manner more humorous than threatening--for their poses are simple, normal ones of stretching, day-dreaming, or pausing on the street. It's simply that the most usual moments, like the most usual objects, grow peculiar or even grotesque when the light changes, a car passes, a window frames them.

I only wish that more of the office photographs were included, where the picture breaks up around some shape in the middle. The viewer is forced to consider paradoxes that make two pictures into one: a secretary in an office window, and a car on the street just outside, presented together with the deftness of a cross-section diagram but without its license.

These photographs come out of the tradition of Bruce Davidson and Lee Friedlander, but already have a unity of their own. It not only runs through their subjects but has its own feeling for a special set of shades and spaces in the world.