At Home in Germany’s Edenic Landscapes

Only one of the pictures in “Heimat,” an exhibition of 11 large-format color photographs by Peter Bialobrzeski, has buildings in it: That is “Heimat 31, Schwatzwald” (2004), and in it the buildings fade away into a white haze of snow and atmospheric vapors. This is surprising because Mr. Bialobrzeski’s last project, “Neon Tigers,” portrayed Asian megacities in which newly erected skyscrapers march shoulder to shoulder into the distance and everything that isn’t vertical seems to have been obliterated.The main feature of “Heimat 31” is the people in the foreground, who wear brightly colored winter clothing that stands out against the white, white snow. There with their children and their sleds, they form small, casual clusters. The buildings in the background appear to be part of a small German village. The architecture is traditional, and a dimly seen church, identifiable because of its twin spires, adds a religious note that connects this picture with “XXX Holy Journeys Into the Spiritual Heart of India,” Mr. Bialobrzeski’s project before “Neon Tigers.” The hilltop that the people stand on fades into the town, which in turn fades into the blank white of the sky that takes up the top half of the whole, and the image takes on a slight tinge of the mystical.Mystical Germans were a serious hazard during much of the 20th century. I do not mean to equate Mr. Bialobrzeski with them, but landscape is never innocent and he must intend something. “Heimat,” the name Mr. Bialobrzeski (b. 1961) chose for this exhibition and for the book that contains more images from the series, means something akin to “homeland” in German. But the word does not carry the political freight of vaterland, taking on a meaning closer to “the place I’m from.” Since Mr. Bialobrzeski uses it only for places in Germany where people immerse themselves in nature, he must intend heimat metaphorically, meaning by it the places where he finds himself spiritually at home.“Heimat 14, Bayerischer Wald” and “Heimat 27, Bayerischer Wald” (both 2005) are also pictures of small numbers of people in a beautiful, pristine world of snow, the white unbesmirched by any signs of civilization. In the former, about a dozen people seen at a distance are approaching the peak of a mountain: The peak rises a bit above the horizon, but the white of the snow in the foreground bleeds into the white of the sky. In the latter, four small figures stand on a peak; below them are trees completely draped in snow, and above is a pale sky with no distinct cloud formations. The quartet is suspended in a Moby Dick-like expanse of white.The horizon line is a key element in Mr. Bialobrzeski’s compositions. The sky fills at least half the frame in “Heimat 6, Nordsee” (2003), “Heimat 29, Nordsee” (2003), and “Heimat 10, Wattenmeer” (2004), but in none is the sky particularly dramatic: It is just immense. As in the snow pictures, the people on these beaches are seen at a distance, so they are small. Unlike in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the 19th-century German Romantic, nature does not challenge or threaten solitary, brooding figures. Instead, people on holiday loiter on the beach, diminished in stature and content in their place.“Heimat 23, Donautal” (2004) and “Heimat 25, Ruhr” (2004) are pictures of people enjoying themselves in a river. Whereas Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of the French on holiday by the Seine in the 1930s emphasized the social aspect of their outings, the picnicking and flirting, Mr. Bialobrzeski’s family by the Ruhr seem as involved with the river itself as with each other. The two little girls in the Danube, except for their bathing suits, could be water sprites. In neither picture is the water polluted, nor is there any litter on the banks or in the surrounding woods. Nature is unmolested and accommodates man in an Edenic landscape, the innocence Mr. Bialobrzeski finds home.***The Miller Gallery is also hosting an exhibition of 15 black-and-white pictures from the 1950s and early ’60s by the Hong Kong photographer Fan Ho. Mr. Ho is a belated modernist, a Bauhaus artist two decades after the fact and several continents away. If Mr. Bialobrzeski’s pictures are flooded with light, Mr. Ho’s are largely overcome with darkness: In them, shadows only grudgingly give way to the outline of a figure or a segment of the city.“The Omen” (1964) looks up from below ground to the backlit silhouette of a man with a large basket on his back. He is crossing a street while a jacket flutters on a line overhead. Because of the perspective, the jacket appears larger than the man, and its twisted arms reach out ominously.“Hong Kong Slum” (1962) also features one man whose identity is obscured: Here he is carrying a bucket as he disappears down an alley of looming awnings and buildings.This is too beautiful to be a documentary image, and has less to do with poverty than with the quality of the light that manages to stream into the narrow space.“Lighted Lines” (1960), “Down” (1961), and “Inferno” (1962) are all pictures of the same flight of public stairs. Together, they illustrate Mr. Ho’s ability to rework material to achieve different effects. In the first, the “lighted lines” are the rim of sunlight on the edges of the steps and the hand railings. Two men stop to talk with each other while others go up and down; the feeling is attractively urban. In the second, the camera has drawn back far enough to capture, at the foot of the stairs, the long shadows of eight dramatically backlit people, all of whom are walking down. The final picture is largely given over to darkness; the stairs are merely hinted at, those trudging on them doomed.Mr. Ho, born in Shanghai in 1932, absorbed European graphic principals while working in the British Crown Colony and adapted them to his purposes. He recently moved to the United States.Both shows until June 29 (20 W. 57th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-397-3930).

At Home in Germany’s Edenic Landscapes

At Home in Germany’s Edenic Landscapes

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