Visit to the Currier Museum

Lisette Model: Reflections, Rockefeller Center, New York, about 1945

Ray Metzker: Philadelphia, 1965

These two photographs caught my eye at the Currier Museum's photography exhibition last week.  I wrote down the names of several similarly striking photographs, but these ones stood out because shadows are something I love to photograph.  I love the abstractions of the shadows in both images.  Scenes like these are common in everyday life, yet they are easy to miss.  These photographers were looking beyond the commonplace and noticing the interplay between reality and light.  Model's photo, shot at night, shows the shadows cast by the people onto the buildings, while Metzker's, shot in the daylight, shows the shadows cast on the boy by some man made object, maybe scaffolding.  I love the use of contrast in both photographs, and the way they both illustrate how there is more to see than what is physically right in front of you.  Light is changing all the time, all throughout the day, and both of these photographers caught it at a decisive moment. 

I think the weakest of the images at the exhibition for me was probably Ruth Jacobi's "Little People," of marbles.  There were many photographs that I loved which were of very simple objects or simple scenes seemingly easily recreated, but many of them had a power which could evoke some emotion within me.  I felt that I could look at this one completely indifferently. 

Alfred G. Buckham: Edinburgh, 1920

If I could choose one image to hang on my wall, it would be this one.  I was drawn back to this image like a magnet the whole time I was there.  I stood before it in complete awe.  How did Buckham capture a scene this beautiful?  I love the low contrast here and the softness of the clouds, the dreamlike essence of it all.  From where did he shoot this photograph?  Another plane?  Edinburgh, Scotland is somewhere I've always wanted to go, and this photograph reminds me of that wanderlust.