Fraenkel Gallery Review

Rodney Graham is turning the art world upside-down.  Literally.  In Welsh Oaks, the current exhibit at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, each of the seven photographs in the series is hung roots up.  The photographs themselves are uninspired: cliched images of country paths winding into the distance, hills dotted with sheep, rolling grassy fields, a single oak, massive and leafless, reaching into the center of the photograph. The composition is standard.  The lighting is uneventful.  The gray tones are drab.  But turned upside-down, the images become statements about nature and perception unparalleled by any landscape photographer.

The initial effect is disorienting.  The exhibit could be a practical joke, a curator’s mistake.  Many viewers practically turned themselves upside-down to look at the images.  But these photographs, which right side up would seem poor imitations of an Ansel Adams landscape, take on a new life.  These modest countryside scenes become games of the mind – tweaking our sense of perception, reordering our sense of up and down.  

Each oak takes on a new shape: a tangled web of leafless branches pouring down into a seamless sky, a humanlike branch of veins and arteries stretching down from the heart of the tree’s root system, a bouquet of dried flowers diverging from a single stem.  Branches and twigs reach down into a gray sky, feathering tendrils stretching away from the ground.  Some of the images look like reflections mirrored in a glassy pool – as if you could throw a stone into the photograph and watch it ripple.

Graham, a Canadian photographer whose work has been shown worldwide, has a long-standing fascination with this inverted style.  His images allow the viewer to see the world the way a camera sees, or the way a human eye sees before the impulse to right things reaches the brain.  This idea is based on the camera obscura, the predecessor to the modern day camera. The “camera” is actually a large black box fitted with a pinhole aperture on one side. The box acts like a human eye.  Light bounces off an outside image and is reflected back through the aperture onto the back wall of the camera – upside-down and backwards – like a photographic negative. Photosensitive paper is hung on this back wall, and the image is recorded.  Graham did not use a camera obscura for this most recent exhibit, but he successfully imitates the effect, printing the photographs nearly six by eight feet – large enough to get lost in.  The black and white photographs are printed on colored paper to give the images a bluish hue.  These subtle tones create a hazy effect, as if you are looking at the trees through an early morning mist.

Since Graham has been using this technique for so many years, the nuance of the work has worn off somewhat.  Ten years ago, he did a similar show in New York using Oxfordshire oaks instead of Welsh ones.  But the effect remains powerful, and new ideas are born at each showing: turn the natural world upside-down and you can set the mind reeling for hours.  

Standing before these magnificent oaks, you feel as if you could walk into this world where up and down have no meaning, walk right into the sky and stare up at the earth.