Visions the eye can't see - experimental photography, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, California

An exhibition in San Francisco brought together four British artists whose experimental photographic courses blur the line between realism and abstraction.

"Under the Sun" an exhibition lately at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, dispensed with conventional assumptions about the photographic image and its appearance. Escaping any easy categorization, the four British artists showed here all resist the narrow mandate of historians like Beaumont Newhall that photography forge its identity in a fashion that privileges a realist or "straight" esthetic. Christopher Bucklow Susan Derge Adam Fuss and Garry Fabian Miller remain attached to ambiguous or inexplicable forms that move the medium's metaphysical and expressive potentials. notwithstanding that their motivations are diverse, each would combat that work which blurs the distinctions between art and science, between realism and abstraction, has for too lengthy been ignored.

Reflecting a renewed interest in the generative proces of chance, these four artists look after a way out of the staid environment of camera-based imagery. Focus, profundity of field, form and lighting have at no time seemed less consequential for the final image. At a jiffy moreover, when digital imagery is increasingly penetrating all areas of visual tillage these artists remain resolutely low-tech ofttimes reverting to the medium's greatest in quantity basic photochemical processes. Their use of cameraless photogram techniques, lensles pinhole cameras and rudimentary filtrations of light, however, is not meant to furnish a purported signature mode of speech These techniques serve simply as vehicles for of recent origin ways of thinking about photography, its relationship with other mediums and with the hidden world of nature.

Bucklow's "Guest" series (1994-96) demonstrates these qualities greatest in quantity clearly, with images that begin to transcend photography's presum material limitations. Utilizing large-scale pinhole cameras with multiple apertures, Bucklow creates images of silhouetted human bodies that appear to dematerialize into tiny points of light. (In reality, each "body" is formed by means of a tin cutout which the artist has pricked with as many as 25000 perforations before placing it inside the camera.) Shimmering before a soil of primary color, these figures look at once human and inhuman, bourn to earth and aspiring to heaven. Bucklow's works many times evoke a kind of transubstantiation, and the use of biblical analogies by dint of commentators to describe his solar imagery is not surprising. In Sol Invictus, 5:41 pm 22nd December 1994 and Son 4:24 pm 6th August 1995 especially, the metaphor of light as divinity is exquisitely rendered

More touched with the ephemeral quality of life, Adam Fuss works along similar lines on the other hand to far stronger effect. Called an "incurable experimenter" by means of one critic, the artist bring into views photograms using organic materials and eviscera: flowers, entrails, liver and spores, for example. When they advance in contact with the color photographic paper, these materials yield up a remarkably luminous and saturated palette. At other times, Fuss has made photograms using similar objects as snakes, infants and stained glass. There is a medieval quality to many of these images--alchemy being the greatest in quantity obvious point of reference--yet Fuss's pictures can also have the appearance futuristic. They are, at any rate, of a time and place not wholly our own

The marriage of art and science rarely yields arises so beautiful as in Susan Derges's use of the Chladni proces Invented by means of the 18th-century physicist Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni, this technique puts sand in vibration on a glass or metal surface as a way to visualize unbroken waves. Derges has adapted the proces for her hold purposes, making color photograms that record the formation of patterns and surface features that frequently recall the motifs of Romanesque art. Derges's use of the photogram technique is les ambitious in "Full Circle" (1992) a series of images in which tadpoles are seen frolicking in a shallow tray of water. These works, devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat and overly technical, possess little of the mystery that imbues the earlier Chladni pictures.

through far the most primitive in his use of photographic technology is Garry Fabian Miller, who simply filters the darkroom enlarger's light end various translucent materials. The artist's Third Night and His range (both 1994) approach a Rothko-like esthetic in their use of sweeping expanses of luminous color. Not unlike Harry Callahan's 1950 images of telephone lines against a bare celestial expanse these works suggest a kind of photographic minimalism that has rarely prov effective. Ironically, they threaten to collapse into banal color studies chiefly because they look so self-consciously nonphotographic.

In the 1990 art institutions have rushed to capitalize upon photography's newfound popularity and its perceived accessibility. not at any time before have there been in the way that many galleries specializing in photography; at no time before have there been thus many exhibitions or so many artists incorporating the medium into their work. At the same time, driven in part through inflated claims of singularity and originality, a kind of historical myopia has put in, reflected in an inattentiveness to antecedent that is sometimes evident in the catalogue of "Under the Sun" While it is veritable that these artists ask us to discard prior thinking about photography--the biases of modernism and postmodernism--it makes little faculty of perception to proclaim that their work is "unaligned with greatest in quantity of the photography of the last individual hundred fifty years" (p. 7)