Alchemy of Light

Through Apr. 7 at Cumberland Gallery

4107 Hillsboro Cir. 297-0296

The current group show at Cumberland Gallery says as much about its curator, the Nashville-based photographer Jack Spencer, as it does about the current state of photography. Although Spencer includes none of his own museum-quality photographs in the Cumberland show, the exhibit offers an opportunity to see what has helped shape the eye of one of the country’s leading contemporary fine-art photographers, while offering the city, woefully devoid of a prominent photo gallery, a much-needed introduction to the international photography scene.

Thirty years ago, the names of the monumental forces in American photography—Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind—were set in stone. But now we are in an altogether different time. “These days, photography is going in so many directions,” Spencer says. “It’s like the music industry, where rap, hip-hop, alternative folk, you name it, are all happening at the same time. It’s an exciting moment because photographers are exploring so much new ground and a new tradition is in the making. While this show represents a wide range of work, from masters to people on the fringes, from those who manipulate the image to those who shoot straight ahead, among them are 20 to 25 future masters whose work just won’t be affordable two decades from now.”

On the other hand, the 41 works on display are not intended to compose a microcosm of contemporary photography. The field is too multifarious for that. Almost from the camera’s inception, photographers fell into two camps—those who used it as a documentary tool and those who wanted to master the machine for the sake of making works of art. But despite the extraordinary achievements of photography’s grand masters such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Eugene Atget, photography has remained a stepchild of fine arts, a fact clearly reflected in the vast disparity in prices between photographs and paintings or sculptures.

In the late 1970s, with the arrival of Cindy Sherman, the line between art and photography became even fuzzier. Although Sherman was certainly taking photographs, and the photographs she was taking were certainly art, they owed nothing to photography’s artistic tradition. As photography curator Paul Galassi once commented, “You might say Sherman’s indifference to—even ignorance of—those traditions was essential to her achievement.” The ranks of postmodern photographers who have followed in her path often spend weeks creating elaborate set pieces, while others combine photographs with other images or media, as if to erase any reference to the subtle shades between black and white that have obsessed fine-art photographers for almost two centuries.

Through all of these skirmishes and full-fledged engagements, the fine art of photography has held its ground, and for the most part—although not entirely—it is those practitioners who are represented in the Cumberland show. To set the stage, Spencer has included a number of classics, ranging from Edward Curtis’ 19th-century “The Rush Gatherers” to Edouard Boubat’s 1947 “Lela,” an ageless portrait of both the woman he loved and the French Resistance. Also featured are lesser-known works by some of the greats, such as Tom Baril, whose photographs build on the long tradition of botanical studies, and Ruth Bernhard, whose classic nudes began to evolve almost immediately after her introduction to the work of Edward Weston.

For all their elegance, though, these masterpieces seem almost tame next to some of the experiments pursued by contemporary photographers like Rocky Shenck. Represented by two extraordinary black-and-white photographs in the show, “Mother Playing Solitaire” and “Daddy in the Woods,” Shenck manipulates his photographs with bleach, causing what looks like a strange, inner light to emanate from within. So while it could be said that Shenck is to photography what Edward Hopper is to painting, his figures radiate a solitude so intense that they seem to burn through the photograph itself.

Although there is a lot of competition for top billing in this show, the 31-year-old Robert ParkeHarrison takes the prize. “Instead of going out in the world to photograph things, I build them. It’s like theater, where you work with costuming,” ParkeHarrison said in a recent Artnews article. Working together, he and his wife often spend months constructing the precise image they want to project, which they then develop in the dreamy manner of a 19th-century print. In “Flying Lesson,” the 1999 photogravure that appears in the show, a man appears to be running through a field holding an aviary in one hand, while dozens of birds, each attached to strings he holds in his hands, fly overhead like kites. If he could only run faster, it seems, the strange flying machine would lift him off into the evening air.

Suggestive of the broad range of the show is the work of four Central and South Americans, including Luis Gonzalez Palma and Mario Cravo Neto, whose photographs introduce the fantastical imagery of the magical realists who dominated Latin American literature and art during the latter half of the 20th century. A Guatemalan, Palma has spent most of his life in a country torn by civil war. To make sense of the tragedies he has witnessed, he combines his portraits with images of bird wings and flowered halos, which render the suffering of his sitters in heart-wrenching and mythic form.

If these photographers are not household names like their literary counterparts, Gabriel García Márquez and Pablo Neruda, it is not because their influence on Western photography has been any less pervasive. In fact, the influence of magical realism accounts for some of the enchantments of Spencer’s work, both in his larger-than-life Mississippi Delta portraits and landscapes and in his most recent work, shot in Mexico.

In reaction to photography’s rapidly changing technology, a number of contemporary photographers have retreated to antiquated techniques. Debbie Luster, for example, relies on daguerreotypes, and even the controversial Sally Mann produces her “Immediate Family” series in salt prints. But according to Spencer, photography is on the verge of yet another revolution, this one spawned by the computer. Although he didn’t include any computerized photos in the show, and most galleries still tend to shun them, according to Spencer, their time will come soon enough. So for the moment, anyway, “Alchemy of Light” is a great way to do some serious catch-up on the field of photography before it is metamorphosed all over again.