Photography: Vesselina Nikolaeva

"Coming of  Age in an Adolescent Society"

Museo Muncipal de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid
June -July 2007

So how are things in Bulgaria these days? Not all that great, I guess, if we are to go by the teenage subjects of photographs taken by Vesselina Nikolaeva. They have just graduated from an elite high school in the capital, Sofia, where they had their little heads filled with all they supposedly need to know for that moment in time, now at hand, when the curtain goes up on Act II of what will be the rest of their lives and days. Funny, though, it doesn't look like they're too thrilled by the prospect.

So far, okay. This could be anywhere. A cross-section of affluent adolescents clearing out their desks in a deserted classroom, or preening for the senior prom. Easy to recognize sub-species like nerds and jocks, sluts and barbies, social climbers and social outcasts. All are being conveyed over the threshold of adulthood with the well-worn rites of passage: getting dressed up for the big dance, getting smashed at the graduation party, enjoying goodbye gropes at somebody's house where the parents have obligingly made themselves scarce.   

But the kids aren't all right. They are seventeen years old, which means they were born the same year their country put an end to one of  Eastern Europe's Looney Tune-class Communist dictatorships (the one that went in for murdering democratic dissidents with poison-tipped umbrellas) and dumped Fearless Leader who had ruled over them since the end of World War II.  The only reality their parents knew was everything that came before them; their only reality has nothing whatsoever in common with it. The state of mind and circumstantial dilemma that Nikolaeva brings to our attention is a problem foisted on them by history for which no one has any easy answers. "If the Old Generation was given identity by the political system, the New Generation is searching for one of its own," writes Nikolaeva in her introduction. "These fragile individuals have to transcend their material reality in order to find a passage from a world nonexistent to a world in the making."

Anywhere else on the planet, a bunch of pre-adults with well-to-do daddies in search of a) an identity b) a way to get people to stop calling them "fragile" c) a future or d) all of the above, would just be a tired cliché. Not here. These kids haven't even got a past. It was abolished the year they entered the world.

As to the photographs themselves, they are examples of the compelling power of straight-up documentary, in which the photographer lies in wait for and usually manages to bag the "telling moment". The camera is not used overtly as manipulating tool, except when the angle is slightly askew, suggesting that the world into which we  are given a privileged glance has gone out of kilter or awry. As well it might be said to be.

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International Regulations for Safety in Case of Forced Sea Landings

Herewith the verbatim text of the seat-pocket safety brochure from 1957 issued to passengers on Iberia Airlines’ then-fleet of  DC-3s. With only a minimum of “improvements” (who could resist?) and no condescension, Robert Graves used it as the basis for a comic sketch imagining the exchange between two office-bound Iberia employees given the job of drafting instructions for what to do in an emergency at sea, drawing on their command of English and assumed familiarity with the odd ways of British tourists. Although none of the characters in it says “Dash it all!” I’ve always read it as an affectionate homage to P.G. Wodehouse, who, as it turns out, was at school with Graves’ older brother. The story is called “Ditching in a Fishless Sea” and it can be found in the collection Majorca Observed. This is the original that inspired the short story, the authentic set of instructions Iberia issued to passengers on its mid-haul flights of the fifties.

(Does exhuming this strike anyone as a cheap shot at the resolutely Europeanized, educated, well-travelled Spaniards of the year 2012? Well, just last week, on the Calle Cádiz, in the raucous heart of Madrid’s tapa-rich quarter just off the Puerta del Sol (go see if I’m making this up) one celebrated bar was trumpeting“calluses and beans” as  the plat du jour. The dictionary will confirm that callos refers to a common podiatric issue as well as to the tripe essential to that signature casserole dish, callos a la madrileña. But as any old Spain hand knows, once you get started on the subject, there is just no end to it.

INTERNATIONAL REGULATIONS FOR SAFETY IN CASE OF  FORCED SEA LANDINGS

Provision and an elementary knowledge of the ambient protect the man in his activities; ignorance, on the contrary, attacks, makes or increases danger inherent to all existing. In communities and regarding transportation, shows, sports, etc., rules leading to a better result are published by their respective organizations, always that these rules are kept wholly. To day this is a must in the air services.

In the most improbable case of ditching, passenger’s life depends on his conduct, as the crew knows quite well what they have to do in such cases not only for their own reputation but for the Company’s and in the first place for the life of the passenger.

Remember that with a few exceptions, there is time enough to get ready in case of ditching and that life waist coats figures 1 and 2A-1B and 1C may keep afloat any person without danger even in the state of unconsciousness and dingies are fit to hold the overweight as well; they are inflated with great rapidity, figure 6, and are revised carefully periodically,

In case of sinking passengers should know that the radio listening station on duty does not even miss the lack of reports and therefore the aid is immediate taking only a short time to come to the spot; furthermore the water the plane is flying over is not dangerous either by large fish or by extreme temperatures.

Therefore the passenger, if following the instructions below and those supplementary given him from the cockpit with order and confidence he will succeed in his own safety.

Should ditching have to be faced, the following instructions will be given to passengers:

Take off your spectacles

Loose your tie and collar as well as belts, braces, etc.

Empty your pockets of pointed articles as pens, pencils, etc.

Take off shoes.

Wear light clothes.

Put on the life waist coat as indicated in figures A1 to 7, B1 to 5 and C1 to 5.

Place the bulks under the legs and adopt the position according to figure A9 and the number of seat.

Fix up your belt.

Passengers before an imminent ditching should have to do the following:

To contract hardly their muscles.

To breathe deeply.

To keep motionless and quiet until the plane is absolutely stop still.

Soon after this, they will loose the belts and shoes to leave the plane by the nearest exit. When head and body have gone complete through the door or the window and according to figure A7, passengers will pull from the inflation string of the waist coast throwing themselves into the water without fear being sure they are safe.

Passengers should not worry if the transfer is difficult directly into the dingy because the string with reel will be thrown to take them on board as in figure 6, bearing in mind that this is an easy operation.

Do not desinflate your waist coat until you are on the boat that will take you to the harbour, passengers must avoid slippering on the stairs rubber or wet wood to prevent falling again into the water.

Children in their life waist coat should be left to persons keeping a better spirit and nearest the exit.

Fat persons as well as invalids should leave the plane by the main exit but always letting others to come out first.

It is very important to keep strict silence to facilitate the manoeuvres and commands.

Passengers should also know the material the dingies are made of and see that IBERIA, whose results without accidents per km. flown is so wonderful per year, is trying to better everything, regarding transportation and specially in connection with safety.

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Photography: Edgar Martins

from Focus, Nov-Dec. 2007  

The Diminishing Present
Galeria La Caja Negra, Madrid
September- October, 2007

Moonless midnight on a deserted beach – deserted, but far from empty. Here, a tether-ball pole that looks like the ensign of a losing army once unfurled from it, intensifying the negative presence of thronging sunworshippers. Rows of thatched sunshades like magic toadstools sprung up under the light of the moon. But there is no moon. Where is it coming from, the light that illuminates the silent dunes so the objects scattered on them cast a suggestive shadow, and every squiggle, track and furrow left in the sand is highlighted like hieroglyphic graffitti?

No, it’s not computerized contrast enhancement – Portuguese-born, Macau-raised, London-residing photographer Edgar Martins never goes photoshopping; he claims that the only light he uses is what his subjects bring with them, though, as you can imagine, his exposures are really long. So what is it, then? Turns out that this particular beach (it’s in Portugal) is actually situated right next to a huge soccer stadium whose wasted wattage makes the sand glow, glow, glow, while the night sky retains its intense blackness.

Thou shalt not set up thy shot, is Martins’other procedural point of honor though it’s hard at first to believe that chance and luck alone placed the little old lady selling bunches of bright colored balloons in that particular time and place (but an out-of-frame stadium certainly improves the odds). Wooodplank-shuttered ice cream stands suggest the machine-gun bunkers that mowed down allied soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. Is this space or time we’re seeing, or the point where the two intersect? You have just crossed over into the twilight zone of “The Accidental Theorist”, Martins' title for this compelling, uncanny sequence of images.  

The other group is called “The Rehearsal of Space”. It’s about forests and trees, you think, photographed the way such things usually are, as arching verticals, contrasting textures and tones of green. But hold on, what is that blurry spot in the background? Morning mist rising in the rain forest, perhaps, with cute little monkeys chattering away? Guess again, it’s smoke. Lots and lots of smoke. Martins took these photographs from a few dozen yards ahead of a rolling wall of fire that devastated the old-growth forests of Portugal and northwestern Spain in summer 2005. So the trees you are seeing are only minutes away from being consumed and annihilated -- on one or two, you can see the bark charring before your eyes. What you don’t see, amazingly, is the fiery juggernaut itself, tongues of flame licking at its prey. (Well, okay, in a couple of them you do see it, but only a couple.) When that reality has been taken in, you can all but hear the screeching sirens and shouted orders. Awareness of the impending peril, real enough for Edgar Martins when he took the pictures, is as disquieting as the metaphysical tease in “The Accidental Theorist” but not less unnerving just because in this case, the scary bits happen to be for real. Did I mention that his photographs are extremely affordable? They won’t be for  much longer.

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Forum the Bell Tolls

from New Partisan, June 26, 2004 

A potato omelet on a hard roll is the portable comfort food of choice for some 46 million Spaniards. But do they have the right to fry up their own, wrap it in aluminum foil and nibble at it wherever they damn well please? Or should they submit to fairground gougers and franchise-holders, especially if they are already shelling out bigtime for entrance to a purpose-built theme park where they are blitzed with exhibits, panel pow-wows and performances pushing an “agenda of principles and values” that includes multiculturalism, sustainable development, and immigration is good for you.

The ill feeling generated by the tempest in a tortilla pan has cast a pall over the first month of the Barcelona Forum, or Universal Forum of Cultures 2004, as it prefers to be known. It opened on May 9th in the Catalonian capital and was expected to draw five or six million attendees before it wraps on September 26th. They’ve been averaging 16,000 per day, about half the anticipated turnout, and so are bussing in school children to make up the difference. Paying customers, however, complained about not being allowed to bring in their own food and drink. Organizers hastily backed down and promised to compensate vendors. There were gripes, too, about a lack of shaded areas to stave off sunstroke, and what some consider an abusive ($25, adults) daily admission fee.

But the real grumbling is over the way the whole thing is being stage-managed by its hosts and sponsors, the municipal (Barcelona), regional (Catalonian) and national (Spanish) governments, and the cynicism with which they trumpet how the Forum will generate money and big-ticket infrastructure projects, invoking by way of precedent the wildly successful makeover that the city received for hosting the 1992 Olympic Games. 

We can cut to the payoff, then, since nobody is pretending there isn’t going to be one. It involves the transformation of the mouth of the Besòs river, where effluent is treated before its discharge into the sea, and garbage from a city of 2.1 million is incinerated. Not that these facilities are to be bulldozed off the map. They are to continue their malodorous but necessary functions under a thick overlay of new construction deployed along the rim of an open plaza covering 30 acres. Barcelona gets a much-needed convention center already booked through 2005, a 3,200-seat auditorium designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, a yacht basin and other urban goodies. “If taking a sewage plant and transforming it for public use is not a cultural paradigm of the 21st century, then let’s have somebody come up here and explain to me what culture is all about,” says Barcelona Mayor Joan Clos.

The Forum is structured around 45 “dialogues”; panel talkabouts in which designated worthies muse on the issues of the day, including bio-diversity, cultural pluralism, Gandhian non-violence and other assets that constitute the “ethical wealth of nations”. In theory, anyone who can establish relevant credentials will be able to grab at the mike in the manner of espontáneos, the bullfighter wannabes who vault uninvited into the ring just to teach a thing or two to the clown with the cape.

UNESCO has granted its solemn seal of approval. Corporate sponsorship is coming from Spain’s big banks, its largest department store chain, and the utility companies that manage the nuclear plants that pump 28% of the energy in the Spanish grid and whom one would sooner expect to find pilloried as perpetrators of ecological outrages. Yes, Coca Cola is on the list, too. 

Odd to see their logos on the podiums on which some 1,500 speakers — some fresh from the anti-globalization clambake that wrapped in January in Bombay, India, such as economist Joseph Stiglitz — will trash everything their sponsors do and stand for. Since it takes two to make a dialogue, some high-end speakers have been signed, along with more sunfaded ex-somebodies including former UN boss Butrous Butrous-Ghali and European Union chief Jacques Delors. Other draws originally hyped in the press kits, namely, Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl and Europe’s favorite communist curmudgeon, Nobel-winner José Saramago of Portugal, have had to, or seen fit to, send last-minute regrets.

Somebody thought it worth mentioning that the political correctness of “Water: A Strategic Resource” has been ratcheted up to “Water: A Resource for Life, Security and Peace”. Nor has it gone unnoticed that T-shirts worn by guides proclaim the wearer’s function in Catalan, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese — but not in English, the language of Bush and Blair, or Spanish, spoken by the peninsular neighbors the Catalonians affect to despise.

But you shouldn’t imagine that it all comes down to leveraging the leftovers of Porto Alegre. Barcelona is too cosmopolitan and fun-minded to embrace the dour earnestness of the anti-Davos crowd without lightening up the proceedings. There’s a pseudo-traditional Catalan “fire festival” on midsummer’s eve, including a center-court seat at an akelarre, “a traditional Basque coven of witches and sorcerers”. In charge of catering is superchef Ferrán Adriá, whose name on the check would make a meal for two exceed Botswana’s GDP. A sub-conclave exists to preview a new board game in which players counter ecological disasters and ethnic conflict through negotiation and mediation, and “if they don’t cooperate, there’s no winner at the end.”

All of this may sound dismally familiar to anyone who experienced Britain’s Millennium Dome a couple years back, and is prepared to admit to it. The Forum’s earnestness is in the direct line of descent from the solenoid-driven sentiment of the Kewpie dolls lip-synching “It’s a small world after all” with spring-loaded jaws, at the Disneyland of the 1960s.

It would, however, be misleading to trash the execution along with the pretense that drives it; there are indeed things well worth seeing at the Barcelona Forum. A handful of the famous Xi’an terra-cotta warriors on loan by the Chinese government are impressively displayed. A multi-media environment called Voices, about human communication, is very well done and to hear Rostropovich conducting Britten’s “War Requiem” is, of course, so much more than endorsing a political statement.

One can’t help wondering, though, if the good people of Barcelona are a mite over-confident about repeating the successes of 1992 with a new type of recyclable and renewable mega-event. They probably figure you can’t go wrong with “encounters in search of new ideas” though it remains to be seen if the crowd they’re hoping to attract are great believers in dialogue as a Good Thing. In Bombay, you had novelist Arundhati Ray coming out with “Debating imperialism is like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?” No wonder Clinton cancelled.

What are the chances it will all backfire and six million malcontents start tearing up the paving stones and torching all the double-parked BMWs? Given that the industrialization of early 20th-century Catalonia gave rise to one of Europe’s most violent anarchist movements, I think maybe it’s a case of better wait-and-see before making plans for a mid-summer stroll up the Rambla to the Boquería market to pick up some late strawberries and a bottle of sparkling cava to uncork on the grass in Antoni Gaudi’s great and goofy masterpiece, the Parque Guell. Spaniard may be almost a dirty word in Catalonia, but let’s face it, who else would go all out to throw a great party and not care all that much about who shows up?

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Photography: Pierre Gonnord

Paris-Seville
Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, 2007

The only real difference between them is about a dozen or so city blocks in uptown Madrid, plus four centuries of elapsed time and technological innovation. Drop by the Prado to check out the Blind Hurdy-Gurdy Player (if not within dropping distance, Georges de la Tour should be on your -- and everybody’s --- coffee table). Then come back to the Juana de Aizpuru gallery to make the acquaintance of Abel with his one empty eye socket, the other buried under a thick carapace of oozing cataract, and an upraised hand whose gnarled fingers are deformed by calluses, cuts and filth. Same deal, right? Same chiaroscuro virtuosity, same mannerisms for depicting the “wretched of the earth” with not a whisker of condescending pity. They’re virtually the same piece of human wreckage, De la Tour’s eyeless street busker of seventeenth-century Lorraine, and Pierre Gonnord’s specimen of a hopeless down-and-outer, a twenty-first century hard luck story in spades.

But Gonnord is a French photographer based in Madrid who travels between Spain and France to search out his subjects in the dirty corners and mean streets where social workers fear to tread, from the Paris banlieue to the squalid shantytowns of Seville, which must be where he found that woman Concepción, whose incredibly resonant face conveys so many possible biographies. Who are his subjects? Illegal immigrants, for the most part, generally from Eastern Europe or North Africa, and not a few of them criminals on the run from the law. Gonnord tells of one: “Michel was born in a circus and grew up surrounded by clowns and wild animals. His parents died early on, and he joined the Foreign Legion. Now he lives by himself, and I sometimes see him sweeping up in some brasserie. He reminds me of one of those characters you see in the bygone Paris of Brassaï.”   

 Gonnord’s evocation of LaTour (1593-1652) lies not just in having his subjects backlit by flickering candlelight.  I submit that the people he photographs are living in  the same conditions of joyless, precarious misery as did, well, practically everybody at the time La Tour chose his subjects,  Murillo put faces on the carpenters in his nativity scenes, Velazquez painted jester dwarfs, and Goya depicted the street ruffians in the Caprichos. You need only take a look at just about anyone’s version of a penitent St Jerome or a pustulent Job – the latter examples bringing us back once again to De La Tour by way of Auden’s: “About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters…”         

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Ackerley & Son

from New Partisan,  April 26, 2005

God spare us from ever having to read the books our children might write about us unless we provide them with opportunities for later-life pursuits less grim than parental payback. To get off the hook, it helps if you are by nature uninteresting. Better a life of quiet desperation than to be laid out on the dissecting table  for  our sins, as befitting murder victims (James Ellroy's mother), Bloomsbury homosexuals united by mutual affection (Nigel Nicholson's mum and dad) or the dysfunctional morons who screwed up Marvelous Me (variations on a theme by Eugene O'Neill from just about anyone you care to name).

In calibrating the refinements of parricidal prose, I know of two such accounts that rate as sui generis thanks to their extraordinary melding of parent and offspring, that is, subject matter and author. Extraordinary not in the sense of great or hugely important, but by virtue of being out of the ordinary, startlingly original and worth a read.

For all I know, My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley (1896-1967) may be required reading these days in Sodomy 101 classes at America's Great Universities, but my impression is that the third of the book taken up with dreary pickups of several hundred young men, mostly of the lower orders and often clad in uniforms of one sort or another, comes up short of the gaiety required for inclusion in the gay lit canon. If aversion therapy ever makes a comeback, though, this might be just the thing. Example: Joe Ackerley is with his father in the dining car of a train. A waiter comes by and an "exchange of smiles and winks" takes place. A few minutes later Ackerley excuses himself, heads off to the lavatory, gets it on with the waiter and returns in time for coffee. In a famous memoir called My Dog Tulip, Ackerley recounted his one and only experience of reciprocated affection, after he had become an old twank who found happiness in a cross-species relationship notorious for having added unwholesome new layers of significance to the word petting.

When not cataloging sexual transactions and churning out self-pity ("the latchkey turned night after night into the cold, dark empty flat"), Ackerley brings his father into focus as a typically bluff and jovial Edwardian known as the banana king of Covent Garden, successful enough as director of a firm of wholesale fruit importers to ensure that Ackerley, his brother and sister enjoyed all the amenities of their social class and era; house in the country, servants, public schools, followed in his case by Cambridge and a harrowing stint in the trenches. The charming, feckless and garrulous mother who took to the bottle in a big way during her latter years gets cursory nods of filial affection.

So the big deal must be that the author and his father had a troubled relationship. No; actually they got on fine. Ackerley wonders whether the old man suspected his proclivities, though it's clear he must have. Young Joe brought his boyfriends home, never feigned even a polite interest in women and by his own account was enough of a swisher to be instantly recognized as such by others of that ilk. Dad was careful never to ask a loaded question, much less a direct one, and pretended not to catch the open allusions in his son's published work. In general, the elder Ackerley was as dutiful and affable a parent as one can hope to draw in life's lottery.

On the first page of his book the author promises "surprises, perhaps I should call them shocks" but not until tertiary syphilis has laid father in his grave with Joe embarked on his distinguished career as a literary editor do we find out what was so special about the progenitor "with his heavy figure, his Elder Statesman look, his Edward VII hat, umbrella and eternal cigar, his paunch, mustache, his swivel eye, his jumps and unsteady gait, dull commuting, respectable life, his important business, his dreary office pals and their eternal yarning about chaps putting their hands up girls' frocks (never into boys' flies)."

Turns out dad led a double life, spending alternate weekends keeping company with a mistress who bore him three daughters that were farmed out to a governess and to whom he paid sporadic but sincere paternal attention in the guise of dear Uncle Bodger. Making provision for his secret family drained the inheritance that was supposed to maintain the other one, so the younger Ackerley ended up supporting his mother and sister for the rest of his life, as he complains (far too often) in this memoir.

Does the revelation of dad's duplicity disconcert Ackerley? No, he makes it clear that as jolts go, the posthumous glimpse into what he calls his father's secret garden "was not severe to a mind as self-centred as mine." But what it does do is open up the intriguing possibility that if Ackerley Sr. could have had one secret life, well, why not two? And why shouldn't that other one have been gay enough to have him turning tricks way back when he was a young, good-looking, penniless trooper in the Royal Horse Guards, a regiment in which the younger Ackerley found easy pickins for pickups.

The final pages of My Father and Myself deal with the son's impassioned attempt to get the goods on the late Alfred Ackerley. as he tracks down doddering old cronies who might have known the truth and obsesses over ambiguous remarks that might absolve him of "his long pursuit of love through sex, out of which, in the end, I emerged as lonely as I began".

Well, was the Banana King of Covent Garden really a fruit? It looks to me like in his younger days, the old boy and some uniformed pals were streetwise enough to tease cash, gifts and favors out of a wealthy count whose inclinations are as clear-cut as are the indications that he was terrified of acting on them or venturing beyond the boundaries of  "befriending" the young protegés he doted on. Maybe not, though. But who cares?

Ackerley does, desperately. "Was not a man who was capable of so much, capable of anything?" he asks himself over and over as he peers at images of his father in fading sepia only to conclude, in consternation and uncertainty, "I would not have picked him up myself" and then immediately adds "but the photograph was said not to do him justice."

What should have been the point of departure turns into the deadest of dead ends; and so Ackerley throws in the towel after exhausting so much of his own energy, his considerable skill as a writer of prose and the reader's indulgence in dogged pursuit of the most Monty Pythonish of biographers' Holy Grails, the outing of  dear old dad.

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Photography: Axel Hütte

Focus, June-July 2006

Two years after a major retrospective in the Crystal Pavilion of Madrid's Retiro park, Axel Hütte is back in town with an encore selection of the photographic landscapes that have been his sole professional pursuit since 1975. The show at the Helga de Alvear gallery was styled North/South and that vertical slash  is enough to make one wary. Is it a tip-off that Hütte, who trained under Hilla and Bernd Becher and with them launched the "New German Photography" movement, has now become a disciple of Barthes? That would be like the cardinal archbishop of Boston suddenly switching to Scientology. But no, it is just a convention of the "duality shows" that seem to have become the flavor of the month for European curators, pairing works in twos, bringing together thematic opposites, b&w and color, old stuff and new -- this from veteran Spanish photographer Ramón Masats in a concurrent show across town.-- trying to achieve an effect greater than the sum of its parts.

In this case, the contrast is between wet and dry, hot and cold, lush and arid, green and brown. None of the very large pictures is identified, or readily identifiable, as a place, though a little research turns up the fact they were taken at the Audubon Swamp in South Carolina, Maui in Hawaii, the sun-baked salt flats of the Canary Islands and elsewhere. Focus, not locus, is the issue -- never do you get the feeling of a particular place or landscape. It's the difference between art and illustration (in the National Geographic sense), poetry and narrative. But as far as I can make out, the relevant juxtaposition is that which fuels the long-running debate (with no winner in sight) between the potential of painting vs. photography. 

Hütte seems to me one of the most painterly photographers in the business -- and that is meant as a compliment. He is especially good at capturing light altered by water, as when it distorts the reflection of a "woman wearing a print dress" just barely visible under a school of swarming tadpoles, herself a figure just as generic and indefinite as the "straight vertical poplar-like trees" that engulf her. His interest in nature is fixated on detail: pinnacles, rocks, waterfalls. In that respect, he is much like Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote in 1797 that "I can contemplate nothing but parts and parts are all little. My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible. And it is only in the faith of that, that rocks, or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sublimity and majesty."

Speaking of sublimity, Hütte obviously beholds and knows his Caspar David Friedrich, though none of the photos on display actually looks even remotely like anything I've ever seen by the big cheese of German Romanticism. Moonlight or mile-high mountains need not enter into it, but the photographer's sense of mystery and awe is similar, as is the way he doesn't let you approach the landscapes too closely, in part owing to the image's huge size -- you have to stand a good distance away to take it all in. Paradoxically, the sensation of being left on the outside produces a visual dynamic that draws you in closer and closer. But in all of them, there's an invisible line he'll never let you cross.

Other photos, however, do bring specific works of art to mind, though not in the sense of being derivative. The waterfall that bisects one image down the middle, from top to bottom, recalls Manet's House at Reuil. And in the way drifts of powder-sugar sand cover two outcroppings so it is impossible to tell where the edges are or what their real shape is. Clouds engulfing a mostly unseen coastal mountain can't help but be read as a homage to Hokusai -- but this is just to give a rough idea. Hütte's work is not so much a reference to paintings as it is to painting, and that is why it will take considerable time for his photographs to exhaust their capacity for being looked at with pleasure and surprise.

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