EXHIBITION DETAILS
Wonder
August 3, 2018
JURORS STATEMENT
One of my favorite photography books is a perfect little poem of a book by Robert Adams called I Hear the Leaves and Love the Light. The nominal subject of the book is Adams’s small white dog, Sally, but to my mind, the book is largely about wonder: finding it in unexpected places, opening yourself up to noticing it wherever you are – in the exuberance of a small dog reveling in the greenery of its own back yard, for example. The point is that wonder is not just the province of children nor, as Adams observed in his brief introduction, should it be dismissed as sentimental. Awe, amazement, fascination and curiosity – these are aspects of wonder, which, as the many talented photographers who submitted their work suggests, can be evoked by anything from the mysteries of an eclipse to a child’s fascination with the movements of an insect.
The photographs selected for this exhibition reflect the multifaceted ways we can experience wonder: through a tender fascination with our fellow creatures; through the pleasure of exploring the photographic medium itself; contemplating a beautiful work of art; or in beauty itself. Wonder has more to do with our capacity for noticing and experiencing it than it does with any particularly wonderful thing, and that is what the photographers in this show do – invite us to see the world differently, look more closely, and openly.
I selected Synurbization and its untitled companion as the Juror’s Selections because they struck me as self-contained visual poems that capture the gestural grace of the natural world but also embody the way photographs can frame an ordinary moment and make it magical. It’s also about light and reflections, crucial elements in photography itself. Like Adams’s photographs of Sally, the subject is simple: birds fluttering around the wires on a telephone pole. But the camera captured the overlapping layers of leaves floating on the surface a mirror-like puddle as well as the reflection of the birds in the air above it, all in the watercolor-like wash of a single plane.
Wonder can feel in short supply these days, but it’s clear from the work in this exhibition that we just need to know where, and how, to look.
Jean Dykstra
