Nature Observed
October 31st - December 6th, 2014
Harry Callahan
Paul Caponigro
Lynn Geesaman
Kenro Izu
Olivia Parker
Eliot Porter
Janet Russek
Todd Webb
Minor White
“Nature should be viewed without distinction…. she makes no choice herself. Withering follows blooming, death follows growth, decay follows death, and life follows decay in a wonderful, complicated endless web the surface beauties of which are manifest to a point of view unattached to vulgar, restricting concepts of what constitutes beauty in nature.”
Eliot Porter
![Paul Caponigro<br><em>Apple, New York City [Galaxy Apple], </em>1964<br/>Gelatin silver print](http://www.photographydealers.com/wp-content/uploads/Artists/Paul-Caponigro/large/20.jpg)
As we embark on the Fall season we continue to remember Eliot Porter’s seminal publication, In Wildness Is The Preservation of the World, the first color publication of the Sierra Club, in 1962, which turned a generation’s attention to the fragility and beauty of the environment and the complex vision of Eliot Porter. On display is a rare over-sized dye-transfer print of Pool In Pond Brook, 1953, which graces the cover of In Wildness Is The Preservation of the World.
The exhibition looks at nine different visions and interpretations of the natural world with images from pictorial to modernist, still life and abstraction.
Todd Webb and Harry Callahan, contemporaries, close friends and room-mates, both chose to leave the assembly lines of Detroit to pursue photography after being inspired by an Ansel Adam’s workshop sponsored by the Detroit Camera Club in 1941. This workshop was influential and, indeed, set them on a life long journey, each finding their own voice in photography. This exhibition features 3 gelatin silver prints of Todd’s, Hemlock, New Mexico, 1969, Garlic Plant, 1966, and Blue Grama Grass, New Mexico, 1963 and a beautiful, uncharacteristic color dye-transfer print by Harry Callahan. In these prints Webb, like Callahan, embraced the use of high contrast, negative space, and abstraction.
Also on exhibition are works by Paul Caponigro and Minor White. Paul Caponigro’s iconic, celestial Galaxy Apple, 1964, astounds us with his mastery of seeing the celestial skies an apple. Minor White is represented by Ivy, Portland, Oregon, 1964, which graces the cover of one of his seminal publications, Rites and Passages, 1978.
Included as well are two of Lynn Geesaman’s beautiful pictorial landscapes, Olivia Parker’s early split-toned still life images, and luminous platinum prints by Kenro Izu.