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By VIVIEN RAYNOR
Published: September 17, 1989
NEW YORK TIMES
ANIMAL and baby pictures may ''sell'' a
newspaper, but they are seldom the stuff of its art columns. Even Andy
Warhol, whose genius was for transforming the banal into art, ignored
(or overlooked) them.
Nevertheless, the examples here - George
Ingham's ''Westie,'' a scene-stealer in luscious black-and-white, and
Fred Stettner's ''Love,'' a study in idealistic color - are among the 30
prints aspiring to art at the Williams Center Gallery in Rutherford.
They are by the five New Jersey photographers making up the recently
formed Camera Arts Group.
All of Mr. Stettner's shots are in color
- the still lifes, including that of brown, yellow, green and red mugs
engulfed in detergent foam, and the abstraction that turns out to be a
study of a variegated tulip. Mr. Ingham confines himself to black and
white, as do the other participants, and like them he emphasizes rocks -
at low tide on the New England shore and infested with icicles in
riverbeds.
He also includes a view of a stone church
steeple, a stunning piece of semi-folk architecture that incorporates a
sash window in the Saracenic style, with wood tracery filling its apex,
as well as conventional 18th-century elements.
Fred de Witt's rocks and dunes are on the
Jersey Shore, and his architecture is the wood porch of an 1869 Cape May
guesthouse, which has been made to look bogus by the addition of signs
set in the tourist typeface known as Steamboat Gothic. Authentic touches
of home sweet home, however, are the wicker furniture on the porch and
the white cat lounging alongside.
Mr. de Witt is also responsible for two
of the show's few digressions: the snout of a 1939 Pontiac in mint
condition and a deeply incised stele of a Mayan deity - a spectacular
print, this.
A photographer partial to textures,
Richard Coda closes in on a pigeon's wing, a window fogged with
condensation and the grain of a wood plank. In California, he stands
back for the larger view - of the Pinnacles National Monument and of
rocks standing like palisades at Point Lobos.
Steve Kaplan ponders the tensile beauty
of cane coiled and hung on a wall beside a bobbin, the Aaron Siskind
possibilities of rocks covered with lichen, and the satiny effects to be
had by making a long exposure of a waterfall. His architecture,
meanwhile, is a shack looming out of grainy atmosphere in Nantucket,
accompanied by overturned skiffs and towels hung out to dry.
All in all, this is a very nice
exhibition and as such should give pleasure to most of its beholders,
especially those who are amateurs of the camera. But to some, including
the reviewer, niceness is not enough, for it is usually the result of
too great a preoccupation with craft, the occupational hazard of
photography.
Perfectionism crowds out thought and the
desire to communicate emotions and ideas, however modest. And because it
also obscures the need to cultivate what may be the most important asset
of all, knowing when not to take a photograph, its victims are lulled
into complacency.
The alternative is not to strive
officiously for originality but at least to consider how many pictures
of, say, lichen-covered rocks are already in existence before adding to
the pile. Given the saturation of life by photography, there can never
be another Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who started as a child and therefore
as a virgin photographer. But it would help if more photographers,
professional and amateur, teachers and a few camera journals would set
an example by sometimes emphasizing content over technique.
On view through Sept. 30, the show can be
seen weekdays from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M. and Sundays from noon to 10 P.M.
The center, which also houses the Rivoli Theater, is on the Williams
Plaza, at Park Avenue.
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