C AMBRIDGE — The Photographic Resource Center’s “Exposure 2024: The 28th Annual Juried Members Exhibition” features the work of 13 photographers — well, 14: Lisa Tang Liu and J. David Tabor work as a team. Each selection consists of three photographs.
Juror Samantha Johnston, of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center , selected them from 170 entries submitted by PRC members. In her juror’s statement, Johnston speaks of seeing “common threads emerge,” including the aftermath of the pandemic and, not unrelated to that, “themes of home and place.” Sometimes with a juried show the juror’s sensibility comes through.
That would seem the case here. Much of this iteration of “Exposure” has a sense of the lyrical and even self-consciously poetical. An effective instance of that sense can be found in Abbey Hepner ’s “Departure.
” A woman at the far end of an empty room stands with her back to a sunny window, the curtains that cover it billowing. It’s a setting as evocative as the title. What makes the image striking is how Hepner plays with depth and picture planes.
In effect, the image is a diptych, and the two halves play off of and enlarge each other. Advertisement With Jeffrey Heyne ’s “Contour Map With Cattle Fence & Silver Spur,” it’s a triptych: pinkish views of the moon flank a snowy Colorado landscape. The image is handsome and disorienting — a different sort of departure from the one Hepner offers.
All three of Heyne’s photographs incorporate archival NASA images, allowing them, as he puts it, to “straddle and blur the line between the lunar and the terrestrial.” The straddling is temporal as well as spatial. That’s also the case with Dean Terasaki ’s work.
Like Heyne, he presents Western landscapes but ones with a shaming historical specificity. The photographs show contemporary views — quite beautiful — of what were once Japanese incarceration camps, from World War II. “Incarceration,” the term Terasaki uses, is far more accurate than the more common “internment.
” On the landscape image, he superimposes a letter written by an internee. Visually, the effect is powerful, if nowhere near as powerful as a larger resonance that draws equally on politics, emotion, and morality. Advertisement Greer Muldowney ’s photographs are far less geographically distant.
They’re of Somerville. A patch of pinkish glow beyond lowering clouds could hardly be more delicately beautiful. Which makes the contrast with a stretch of railroad track in the foreground all the more striking.
Muldowney’s photographs in “Exposure” come from her series “Monetary Violence,” a title that suggests their underlying, unblinking seriousness. Procedurally, the most interesting work is the collaboration between Liu and Tabor. They collaborate from afar.
She lives in Stoughton, he lives in Phoenix, and they would double-expose black-and-white film (all the other photographs in the show are in color), getting results that seem as much emanation as documentation. They’re from a series called “Alchemy of the Unknowns.” A title like “Silhouette on Fence” is accurate as description, but it leaves unstated the whole emanation aspect.
Adding to the spectral effect is the photographs having black mattes and black frames. They’re also notably smaller than the other selections, being just 10 inches square. The largest photograph is Laura Beth Reese’s “@mattjames919,” at 40 inches by 32 inches.
It’s also the only photograph in “Exposure” with cinnamon buns visible (and scale means we’re talking Cinnabon-size baked goods). Reese’s three images are so hyperactive they almost look Cubist. Presumably, that’s not intentional.
The resemblance to Dutch still life in Astrid Reischwitz ’s photographs is very much intentional. As regards photography and non-photographic visual tradition, there are also Andrew Zou’s two “Self-portraits With Chinese Calligraphy.” Both are distinctive and arresting, if not as much so as his “ Self-portrait by the Sea,” which might alternately be titled “Dorsal Nude with Container Ship.
” It’s the first picture you see as you enter the VanDernoot Gallery. Chances are it’s also the one you keep coming back to. Advertisement EXPOSURE 2024: The 27th Annual PRC Juried Members Exhibition At VanDernoot Gallery, University Hall, Lesley University, 1815 Massachusetts Ave.
, Cambridge, through Sept. 29. 617-975-0600, www.
prcboston.org Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.
com ..
