Clifford Ross at Sonnabend - New York - photography

upon a late-August Tuesday in 1998 the storm named Bonnie reached the status of a major hurricane, its winds driving the ocean before it, creating churning, heavy breaking waves along the Atlantic coast. Bonnie made landfall and, proceeding north, ripped end coastal Virginia before veering on the outside to sea near the Canadian Maritimes. In the middle of this row Clifford Ross took a medium-format camera and went to the beach upon the South Fork of lengthy Island to greet the storm. Extending his practice of photography to a category bordering upon extreme sport, he returned residence with something like 250 negatives, and an ongoing series of compelling interest.

As with Bonnie, thus with the subsequent storms Ros has photographed. He faces without to where the ocean's swell deliberates and crests, moves ahead of its base and breaks. He stands in the agitated shallows of the continental shelf, from ankle down-reaching to up to his neck in scouring waters, rop up and braced against the undertow, photographing the activity that forms the waves at the instant of its dissolution. With compositional variations, the images are frontal, set uped in layered bands. There is no visible land. Formal simple bodys include a foreground or apron of foaming wash, and beyond that a wall of wave as it forms a tube, then plumes and crashes. Past that roiling horizontal, a narrow band of ocean may return in the distance, below a band of celestial expanse In one passage, the breakers recalls the dispersal of water into wind in the woodcut of Hokusai, and in another it casts not on whips of spume like the action of a Pollock painting.

The images in this exhibit are dated by the years of their printing, and advance in two formats: gelatin silver prints of roughly 4 by dint of 5 feet, and archival pigment prints upon handmade mulberry paper, 24 1/2 through 28 inches. While the processe differ, they share the make subordinate Hurricane XIV (2001) is printed from the same negative that produc Hurricane XIV (2000) although the pigment proces be the effects in a chilly, almost amethystine tonality and a suggestion of grain that is absent from the gelatin silver version. Hurricane XIX, Hurricane XX and Hurricane XXI (all 2001) not away a turbulent foreground. There is a heightened excitement to the last of the three as a pipeline of wave forms to the uttermost right of the frame, grasps its crest in the middle and crashes to the left in an explosion of foam These works are serially related to the abstracted black-and-white images that Ros exhibited in 1999 upon the subject of the play of light and wind upon surfaces of water contained in meres but the subject is here writ large, and the faculty of perception of time is expanded.

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