Untitled, 1997-98, C-print, 20 x 24 in.

The colors are otherworldly, evoking infrared photography, digital manipulation, or fauvist vision. Due to the ambient light sources used by the photographer, primary colors dominate the exhibition. These sources are limited to the light from within houses, spots used to illuminate yards and architectural details, and the head and tail lamps of the photographer's automobile. Through long exposures the film records incandescent light sources and reflections as yellows and whites. The brake light illuminations register as intense cadmium red, while fast blues from star or evening light are captured as fields of ultramarine. Exacerbated by enlargement, the graininess of the light sensitive film gives these works the appearance of a humid atmosphere that works well with this organic night setting.

The roadside foliage of Untitled (#35) is bathed in red brake lights that make even the greenest leaves seem, like the road curves sign at right, to evoke caution or a sense of emergency. The red lights seem those of the police or paramedic piercing a country thoroughfare's darkness. This photograph could be Pollock's Fireplace Road or the scene of Warhol's Saturday Disaster. The rectangles of diffused house lights loom in the distance, while a chemical blue sky mixes with the red leaves.

Other photographs, like Untitled (#33) define only soft-edged (window) planes of pale yellow light in black fields, or in the case of Untitled (#12) a single triangle, right of center, of a partially illuminated garage door.

Untitled (#36) shows a suburban version of Albert Speer's light architecture on a modest house replete with Neoclassic articulations (and Venturian pretensions to grandeur). The exterior illuminations make the structure seem to be composed of light rather than physical material. Walls, pediments, and porches are limited to white cones emanating from garden spotlights and are otherwise enveloped in black night.

Like Brassaï's Parisian nocturnes in which the subjects seem to emanate their own light, Lichtenstein reminds us that photographic vision is not human vision as the camera sees light in ways we never can. The uncanniness of these works lays in this difference due to the fact that contemporary humans seldom encounter such night scenes photographically. The power of Lichtenstein's works comes through revealing a specific photographic perception that isn't immediately legible to our cultured eyes, despite the idea that we are used to experiencing our world through photographic vision.

Another source of the uncanny comes from the compositional isolation of the house subjects. Surrounded by thickets and darkness, the structures seem terribly vulnerable to surveillance, to voyeurs, and even to the scopophilic artist taking long exposures (think Rear Window in the backwoods).

William V. Ganis

Miranda Lichtenstein: Danbury Road is at Steffany Martz
November 19 - December 19, 1998.