SHIRINE GILL

By Sarah L. Webb

LASM EXHIBIT EXPLORES THE RANGE OF ABSTRACT PHOTOGRAPHY

In contemporary culture, people look at photographs to provide answers. Where were you yesterday? What color was my dress the night we met? Is Sam’s dimple in his left or right cheek? But there’s a sort of photography that raises more questions than answers. There’s a kind of photography that makes us want to remember the actual photograph rather than the moment in time it reflects.

“The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography” is a new exhibit at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum that frees photography from that burden of proof by abstracting what our culture expects from photographs. This exhibit allows viewers to appreciate color, form, texture, and mood because it frees them from the cognitive burden of an easily identifiable figure.

“One of the motivations was to explore that idea [of abstraction],” said Lyle Rexer, who curated the exhibit. “What the heck is it when we talk about abstraction? What most people would recognize as abstraction is the same thing...

By Graham Bell

EXTREME PHOTOGRAPHY AND ABSTRACT STATES

A peculiar thing happens when you cannot see into a photo; when there is no illusion, no visual depth, no window into a captured moment. Representative photographs are windows into a world (whether real or imagined), and the general practice when viewing them is to look through the medium to get at the subject. Rare is the audience member who notices the glossy finish before the picture it contains.

For painters, it is easier to give in to total abstraction. They start with materials that must be built up in order to make something recognizable. For photographers, the film and camera are specifically designed to capture the world through photons, delivering varying levels of reality.

A traveling exhibition mounted by the Aperture Foundation, “The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography,” now showing at the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, brings together a cadre of international artists interested in the ways that the photograph and photographic process can be used in art...