Flashes of Florida beauty
An exhibit in Tampa is a testament to the mixture of serendipity and skill that marks good landscape photography.
By Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic
Published August 30, 2007
Florida Showcase
At the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, 200 N Tampa St., Tampa, through Sept. 8. Featured photographers are Connie Bransilver, Clyde Butcher, John Moran, Jeff Ripple, James Shadle, James Valentine, Carlton Ward Jr. and Eric Zamora. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. $4. (813) 221-2222 or www.fmopa.org.
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TAMPA - In art, as in life, timing can be everything, and size often matters. Those were the two thoughts I had during a turn around the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts' exhibition, "Florida Showcase."
The scheduling of the exhibition couldn't be more perfect. We see it in an air-conditioned gallery in the midst of the blistering late summer heat. It reminds us of all we're missing outside - plants growing, animals roaming and clouds going by - both in the present tense through no fault of our own ... who wants heatstroke? and maybe what will be missing in the future (definitely through faults of our own ... reference An Inconvenient Truth).
A case in point is John Moran's Beauty and the Beach, taken somewhere on the east coast just after sunrise. It's a beautifully composed and executed photograph: A bloom from a ground-covering plant is monstrously enlarged in the foreground while a dramatic depth of field takes our eyes to the shoreline behind the flower and the sun coming up over the water, shining through the petal's translucence.
The problem - and here's where the "size matters" thing comes in - is that this print is too small, about 15 inches in height, smaller in length. Around the corner, Clyde Butcher's larger format looks behemoth in comparison, a tribute to swampy grandeur, proclaiming that photography aiming to show the majesty of nature needs to be majestically sized.
Bigger and more beautiful is Moran's River of Dreams. The photographer shot it at dusk, sinking a blue gel lamp into the shallows of the IchetuckneeRiver, uplighting surrounding trees and opening his shutter for a long exposure. Then, serendipity. Fireflies buzzed through, and the camera tracked their flight as glowing yellow pinpoints.
These landscapes and their varying scale reinforce the necessary illusion of that genre, whether in painting or photography. Even the largest examples aren't life size, yet the best bring a larger-than-life viewing experience, the wishful thinking that you are there.
Butcher is a master of that seduction in black and white, as is Carlton Ward Jr. in color.
In one shot, you can almost feel the dust rising in your throat, along with the cowboy herding his cattle. In another, your instinct is to step back when fixed by the glittering eye of an emerald alligator, even though you know rationally yours is only a reactive response.
That's the power of good landscape photography, its immediacy.
Connie Bransilver works the other side of the illusion in blowing up the elusive ghost orchid to unnatural proportions. In reality the orchid is small and unprepossessing; here, without its Everglades context, its size acts as a symbol of its rare status.
A "Florida Showcase" has to include birds, preferably water birds. Eric Zamora's pelicans look at a casual glance like stock nature photos. They're actually far more interesting.
In Moran's Aerial Ballet, five pelicans are captured at the second their wings are in various flight positions, resembling the Old Master sketches that illustrated flight's principles or the 19th century stop-action photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.
Purpose and Grace celebrates the renegade spirit of one bird who takes off above the flock standing in line like DMV supplicants.
About half the prints in the show are midsize, which is practical commercially.I could imagine them selling well at an outdoor art festival.
That's smart and grounded.
A parting thought: Take a cue from nature and wing it.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.