Opinion: Color Contrasts
Earlier in the year, the Lizan Tops Gallery in East Hampton presented the landscape of the East End as seen through the eyes of painters; now it is the turn of the photographers, in a show that will remain on view through New Year's Day.
Two of the most satisfying works are by a newcomer to East End shows, Richard Calvo of Westbury. In "Storm Watchers," two-thirds of the frame is filled with the swirling, leaden clouds of an approaching storm.
At water's edge on the flat beach, separated from the viewer by a shallow tidal pool and dwarfed by strand and sky, a couple stand together, watching.
Change Of Mood
In the other, showing sedges in shallow water, the mood changes completely. From the milky surface, some fronds leap upward and some curve over to touch the water, combining with their reflections to form an amazing abstract composition of loops, curls, swoops, and circles.
It is perfectly titled "Joie de Vivre."
Mr. Calvo is rigorous in his composition, whether it shows pilings in a bay, geese walking through snow, or, in "Last Day of Winter," three trees at the top of the frame cropped in mid-canopy.
Ken Robbins's East End is the one we all know, but it is moodily different in a way that forces you to rethink the familiar. The colors are somber, hinting more at the past than the present, and even a line of weekenders waiting for a Sunday Jitney takes on an elegiac and wistful quality.
Mr. Robbins hand-colors black and white prints with a small palette of muted pinks, chartreuse, and robin's-egg blue. Some have a light patina of scumbled texture, added during the developing process, which softens some features while leaving others sharp-edged.
The photographs transmit a certain sadness, a lament for something lost. In Mr. Calvo's photos there may be distant sounds carrying across the fields or water, but those of Mr. Robbins are wrapped in an almost impenetrable silence.
Animate Trees
Infra-red photographers can be such hams - using the technique to produce endless spooky and unsettling effects - that it is a delight to meet one of restrained subtlety. Gary Bartoloni's infra-red sepia silverprints are handled so delicately that the process is hardly detectable.
Perhaps this is because he is also a botanist. He first used the process, which reveals the levels of chlorophyll in leaves, to diagnose sickness in trees.
And in his dreamlike landscapes, it is certainly the trees that hold center stage, almost animate in their intensity.
Tulla Booth
In "The Wise Man," for example, a maple spreads its twisted, top-heavy branches, half-choked with creeper, from a thickened trunk; sunlight burns through the undergrowth and the leaves leap into white flame.
Mr. Bartoloni's countryside is also familiar, but here it is new and glowing and cleansed of human contact. In these visual parables of the sanctity of nature, there is also an environmentalist's crusading voice.
Tulla Booth, who is known for her giant photos of flowers, often captured through different-colored filters, here shows some colorful landscapes, including an interesting composition of bare trees and dry grasses called "Winter Fields."
Barbey's Morocco
After a first course of Long Island's tranquillity, Bruno Barbey's photographs of Morocco at the Sag Harbor Picture Gallery are like a Madras curry.
A French photographer who has been a member of the renowned Magnum photo agency since 1965, Mr. Barbey was raised in Morocco and has exhibited all over the world. This, however, is his first show in America - a coup for Sag Harbor and a tribute to this small but knowledgeable gallery.
Mr. Barbey's Morocco is one of narrow back streets and broken cobbles, crumbling walls and flaking paint. But primarily it is a country of color - magenta and yellow headdresses, hennaed fingers, walls of turquoise and cobalt blue, a courtyard the color of a ripe pear.
Cats And Shadows
There's a wonderful shot of a girl running down a cobbled street, captured in mid-stride between two sea-green doors. The honey-brown of her dress and the black and white robe of another girl are reflected in the colors of two cats sitting on a wall in the foreground, and the shape of one of these cats is exactly echoed in the black shadows which fall across the street.
It had to be chance, but it looks deliberate.
In "Shrine of Moulay Idriss," a group of elderly men and women sit or crouch beside an elaborate tessarae wall in a composition as formal as a Fra Angelico. In a natural chiaro scuro, cream and white details of their costumes leap from the humid darkness of the narrow street.
In an alleyway in the Blida quarter of Fez that is no more than two feet wide, the sun penetrates the gloom and touches an old man, whose djellaba is the same color as the walls and the sand beneath his feet.
Ocher, Russet, Crimson
In another shot, a black-robed man sits on a curb, his face in his hands, against the background of a glowing russet wall covered with handprints, the mark of Fatimah. It is spectacular.
There are Berber women with painted cheeks, ocher goatskins drying in the sun, fishing nets of maroon and crimson, a glimpse of the red interior of a cafe, a donkey with a television set strapped to its back, the flashes of gunshots from mounted celebrators at a royal wedding, and a shot from above of two women cleaning out a mosaic fountain.
Mr. Barbey, who uses the cibachrome process to produce his rich, saturated colors, has led an adventurous and dangerous life - a deep-sea diving assignment led to a four-year paralysis - and something of the vigilant loner comes through in this show, which is not to be missed.