REVIEW: Photo Club Shows Off Fresh Exhibit

Harvard Photography Club Spring Show

Adams House ArtSpace, April 25-27

The quality of the photographs varies greatly in the Harvard Photography Club’s recent exhibit in the Adams House ArtSpace, as does the talent and seriousness of the photographers, ranging from clear dabblers to potential professionals. The exhibit, which consisted of work produced by students in its six-week long introductory class, displays an equally broad range of subject matters.

The most striking of the three photos by Alexandra E. Hynes ’05 is a study of palms. A vision of some tropical spring break locale, the vertical image captures a leafy overhang that seems to float in mid-air, its ostensible support outside the bounds of the lens. The shadowed interior fronds reveal the internal structure to be hollow. The scene is similarly hollow, empty, deserted. There are two more trees, in at the fore, with one sized more like a shrub, but the viewer can just glimpse an island’s coast, and the open sea, in the background. The contrast between dark and light is artful and the image clear. The white of the sky is pure.

In contrast, the landscapes by Whitney E. Harrington ’04 are gray. Whether their more temperate settings exude a clouded light or if the choice (or error) was in the developing process, the final images are fuzzy. In the better of the two, the horizon of an abandoned country lane is a barricade just yards away—a dark hole at the center of the scene. However, the shapes of the trees, against a mottled sky, are so clear it would not be surprising if the veins on a single leaf were visible.

The work of Harrington and Hynes is marked by loneliness. Both give a sense that a landscape empty of people is empty of life, no matter the state of non-human life in the photograph. But the work of Laura E. Dichtel ’05 is far less desolate. Her landscapes, though aesthetically ordinary, are unique to the show in that they still hold hikers, both on the trail and posing, tangled up in trees, or else broad ideas, as in her cityscape of what seems to be downtown Boston, where a polished granite wall bears the inscription “HOLOCAUST.” The word’s horror and history populate the photo with suggestions for further inquiryabout the relation of the Holocaust to modern-day, urban America.

Her close-up portrait of an elderly man in a wheelchair and a baseball cap intrigues the viewer and poses questions as well. His lips and his chin and his clenched right fist are indeterminate and open to interpretation. His eyes are clear and asymmetrical, but it is unclear whether they are haunted, surprised or amused. Context beyond the suggestion of a nursing home in the background might have helped to narrow down these emotional options; however, the inability to categorize the man’s expression so quickly prevents the viewer from dismissing the man himself as a kind of archetype. The sensibility of this photograph reveals a depth and potential to Dichtel’s composition beyond much of the other work displayed, including her own other pictures.

Most of the photos by Nicholson Price ’03 unfortunately rise little above the mediocre. His most striking image, however, operates within the cliché of superimposition, but does so surprisingly well. A sculpture of a founding-father-ish figure in long robes, behind a humanoid angel arcing toward heaven, fills the left and center of the picture. A stone lion sits off to the side; eagles guard above. In the sky to the right, though, floats a meditative woman standing against a tree, her chin filling the ground between the angel’s head and shoulders.

Despite the dialogue in Price’s photograph, it is Meghan M. Brown ’05 who shows perhaps the most potential of all the exhibited artists. Her subway scenes of a young family and a T-musician are well-composed shots of unexciting subjects. The quality of her self-portrait, however, suggests that she may have the vision to tap into her visual arrangement skills and arrive at terrific art.

In the photo, she, as the subject, lifts a white veil off her face and above her head. She is inside some sort of tent, and Christmas lights spider down behind her. She averts her eyes from the gaze of her own camera. Here, the dialogue is not a two-way conversation within the photograph, but a tripartite one among the image, its composer and the viewer.

—Crimson Arts visuals critic Alexandra B. Moss can be reached at abmoss@fas.harvard.edu.