Edward Grazda’s exhibition of 50 black-and-white photographs currently at Sepia International is titled “Recuerdo, a Memory of Latin America 1972–1979” in part because of the happenstance that two of the images contain parts of the word “recuerdo,” but more because the body of work as a whole has the dreamlike quality of memory. At any rate, Mr. Grazda wants to indicate with his title that this is not a documentary, National Geographic-like record of the seven trips he took to Latin America in the 1970s. There are no tourist highlights here, no newsworthy events. Only haunting glimpses of desperately poor people and the landscape of poverty they inhabit.

“Haunting,” however, does not necessarily mean “oppressive.” The first of the untitled pictures in the exhibition is from Huehuetanango, Guatemala (1975), and it is haunting because of its great charm. A young man, maybe not yet 20, is having his picture taken in an outdoor studio. It is probable that the unseen photographer is itinerant and travels with his makeshift studio from village to village. The cloth backdrop features a crudely drawn veranda in the foreground, a mountain and clouds in the background, and in the middle a stylized branch with leaves and flowers, beneath which is written “Recuerdo,” except that part of the word is obscured by the young man.

The young man stands erect. He wears a white hat, stripped pants held up by a belt with a large metal buckle, and leather boots. These must be his holiday clothes. His right hand is akimbo and his left holds the collar of the jacket slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. He poses with his chin up proudly, but with his eyes bashfully closed, indicative of the ambivalence with which he confronts the camera, and all that he hopes or fears he will see in the eventual image. On either side of the backdrop are placards displaying samples of the photographer’s work, the pictures of themselves his subjects either gave to their loved ones to be remembered by, or which they kept for themselves as souvenirs of being in a time and at a place: “Recuerdo.”

Mr. Grazda (born in 1947, in New York City) has a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, and no doubt intended a reference to Walker Evans’s “Penny Picture Display, Savannah” (1936) by including the samples of the work of the anonymous photographer from Huehuetanango in his own frame. It is a reminder both of the fraternity of photographers, and of how they learn from each other. The pictures at Sepia International are printed full-frame with a black border, like those of Henri Cartier-Bresson. The prints are frequently grainy and have high contrast like those of William Klein. And the compositions often have a casual, anecdotal quality like those of Robert Frank. But Mr. Grazda has absorbed his lessons well, and developed a highly charged style admirably suited to recording his unique memories.

Across the bottom of a picture from Paucartambo, Peru, (1974) is a bed that abuts a crib-like arrangement that abuts a chair that abuts another bed. The blankets and sheets on this jammed furniture are all in disarray; there is no telling how many people sleep here. Painted on the left of the grayish wall is a large elephant, and, on the right, an animal that may be a bull. Tacked to the wall is a three-dimensional figure of some sort, crude and made of several parts, that seems to be pronouncing a benediction on the shabby room. One of Mr. Grazda’s talents is his sensitivity to light; the right side of the picture is in deep shadow as if the exposure was made with the weak light let in by a partially opened door.

A picture from Santa Maria de Jesus, Guatemala, (1975) shows particularly deft handling of a very tricky lighting situation. The picture was shot in a room with two doors to the outside on the rear wall. A man, a girl, and a woman with a child slung on her back stand between the doors and the photographer, so their aspects toward the camera are in dark shadow; we make out their features with some difficulty. Rising up outside the right hand door is a flight of steep stairs in very bright sunlight, so bright that the figure of the boy climbing the steps is almost blown out, seen so faintly he is etherealized, and might as well be a spiritual being as a flesh and blood child. The different weight given the figures in the two lighting situations gives the picture as a whole the phantasmagoric quality that is one of the hallmarks of Mr. Grazda’s project.

Another hallmark is that although Mr. Grazda has a recognizable style, his pictures are never formulaic. In each instance he responds in an aesthetically appropriate way to the circumstances at hand. A very dark picture from Cuzco, Peru, (1977) depends largely for its effect on light reflected from the metal components of a 45-rpm record player. The three components of a picture from Oaxaca, Mexico (1975) — a tacky, illuminated reproduction of the Last Supper, a Seeburg jukebox, and the blurred figure of a woman walking past a table — are neatly balanced as if they naturally belonged together. Four groups are visible in a bare public space in Copacabana, Bolivia (1975) — six men with their backs to us in the foreground, ten men in the upper right dancing around a musician, three women sitting on the ground to the left, and three women dancing energetically in the middle — and, as with most of Mr. Grazda’s memories, all seems oddly right.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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