Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 19, 1990                   TAG: 9003172278
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E3   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Kathleen Nolan
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PHOTOS OFFER STUNNING LOOK AT LIGHT OF NIGHT

As the show's title indicates, all of the photographs were taken at night and play upon the contradiction between a medium dependent on light, and its nocturnal absence.

Apart from this common context, the photographs in this exhibit are very different from each other, since they span a period from the late 1890s through the 1980s.

None of the photographers represented worked exclusively at night, and each responded very differently to a nighttime setting. Some captured the evanescent quality of something half-glimpsed, as the camera lens mirrored the imperfect night vision of the human eye. Other photographers worked against this natural limitation, creating startling images of revelation.

Cities are frequent subjects, because of the tension between artificial illumination and the natural darkness. New York is a favorite; the oldest piece in the show being William Fraser's 1897 image of Columbus Circle veiled in mist.

One of the strongest photographs is another New York scene, by Berenice Abbott, who had rediscovered the work of great photographer of Paris, Eugene Atget. Abbott made equally striking portraits of New York, among them her 1935 aerial view of the city as blazing towers of light. European cities also appear, as in view of the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris by Brassai, one of the few artists represented who worked at night often. Margaret Bourke-White, positioned as usual in the heat of the action, captured the skyline of Moscow illuminated by German bombing in 1941.

Most of the images are less about the documentary function of photography than about its expressive aspect. This is clear in the work of Steichen, one of the early 20th-century Pictorialists who created romantic photographs in soft focus, for example, his 1903 "Portraits, Evening."

It is also true of contemporary artists, like Arthur Ollman, whose heightened color photographs like "Ile de la Cite" describe a night vision of surreal clarity. Even the photograph that looks most like a document of a particular place and time reflects a photographer's calculations. In a 1956 print of great regional interest by O. Winston Link, a steam engine passes by a West Virginia drive-in theater. This seemingly spontaneous image was, like many of Link's, carefully constructed, with movie-goers recruited for the occasion.

Keith F. Davis, who curated the show for Hallmark, says he believes the photographs all share "cultural and psychological associations of the night."

The images are so disparate in their subject matter and mood that I was unable to find this common core. Most of them are, however, about the process through which photography, like all forms of art, seeks to make order out of the randomness of human experience.

Virtually all of the photographs display a strong sense of design, and virtually all are technically very fine. While I did not take any single message away from this exhibition of night photographs, I was struck by the richness of the tradition of photography as art that this show represents.