Chuck Kelton’s father was dying when he began his “Forest” project three years ago. To express his complex feelings about the inevitability of change and his passion to hold on to what was dear, Kelton exposed sheets of photographic paper to moonlight in the forest near his in-laws’ place in the Berkshire Mountains. Mr. Kelton maundered through the Berkshires with his sheets of photographic paper accompanied by his 12-year-old son, Zane, who alternately paid attention to his father’s work and stopped to listen to the sounds of the forest at night. When carefully processed in Mr. Kelton’s laboratory, these pictograms showed haunting traces of the tree branches cast by moonlight. Ten of them are included in “Out of the Darkroom: Kelton Photographers,” currently on display at Ch’i Contemporary Fine Arts.

Several of Mr. Kelton’s prints employ highly sophisticated darkroom processes such as solarization, and all of them are toned with gold chloride that gives them a seductive finish. The results are spectral and enigmatic: They “remind us that there are still Gods hidden in the forest,” in the words of Mr. Jean Claude Lemagny, the director of photography at the Bibliotheque National in Paris.

Mr. Kelton is a master printer, and Kelton Labs is one the city’s most distinguished darkrooms for the production of traditional black and white gelatin silver prints. The lab’s clients include such star photographers as Helen Levitt, Danny Lyons, Mary Ellen Mark, Matthew Barney, Lillian Bassman, and Lou Stettner. They depend on Mr. Kelton and his assistants to realize the beauty in their negatives in exactly the same way composers depend on conductors and orchestras to realize the beauty of their scores. Kelton Labs is like a Renaissance atelier manned by artists/artisans: All of the lab’s personnel are themselves photographers, and all except Chris Schwer, Neil Runyon, and Barron Rachman have work displayed at Ch’i.

Jimmy Serkoch is the lab’s film department manager. Four 13-inch square pictures show his proficiency in studio photography — “Power Station,” “Temple City,” “The Warehouse,” and “Suburbs.” As the names imply, these are all architectural images and cityscapes, but all were shot on a tabletop, and all the constructions are of electrical components secured to the sort of boards that hold the guts of computers or stereo amplifiers. The boards are placed on a dark ground with a curved horizonlike edge and a brilliant light rising behind it. The scale keeps changing as the images are studied: First they seem to be futuristic urban projects, then miniature electrical doodads, then huge constructions again. I particularly like the twin ziggurat objects in the upper right-hand corner of “Warehouse.”

Leslie Sheryll is Mr. Kelton’s wife and a co-owner of Kelton Labs. All of her works are studies of vessels — either crushed beverage cans or abandoned plastic bottles — found in Jersey City where the couple live. They are treated as archaeological artifacts, in the way pottery vessels from ancient Greece or glass containers from Egypt and classic Rome are examined to illustrate the civilizations that produced them. The four pictures of beer and soda cans do not celebrate them as objects of pop culture, but look on them in their crumpled disarray as Shelley imagined the wreck of the statue of Ozymandias.

Ernst Haas and Walker Evans photographed spent cans in color, but Ms. Sheryll’s “Vessel #6” is a classic meditation on decay in black and white. The 18-inch-by-19-inch study of the top of an aluminum can greatly enlarges it: The ingenious pop-top is now useless, the circle of metal scored with dirt and friable. The scratches, tiny dents, and disintegrating edge are clearly visible. Like Shelley’s “traveller from an antique land,” we are left to contemplate mortality.

Spotting is a critical task in any professional lab: The spotter uses a delicate brush and special ink to cover spots caused by dust on the negative or paper. It takes a keen eye and a steady hand. Gerald Mocarsky does the spotting at Kelton Labs. The six pictures by Mr. Mocarsky at Ch’i are from his “In My Bed” series, and are disturbingly intimate. He began work on it more than a decade ago while dealing with a prolonged bout of depression. Mr. Mocarsky found he simply did not want to get out of bed, so he conceived of the bed as a stage, set up his camera on a tri pod, and photographed himself in ways emblematic of the psycho logical problems he was trying to overcome.

The bed is hedged in on three sides by black walls and covered with black sheets and pillows in black slips. In “#2” Mr. Mocarsky is on his knees and twists his body so that his outstretched hand is to ward the camera. In “#8” the walls are plastered with identical por traits of himself, but he is on the bed naked with his own head cov ered with a black cloth. In “#5” he is clothed, and kneeling at a stool reading a paper on its seat: The bed is decked with ropes like those at a boxing ring, but tied as nooses Disturbing.

Shelton Walsmith no longer works at Kelton Labs, but contin ues as a client. “Cistern” and “Mexican Allure: The Moon” might be postmodern examples of Pictorialism, except that the ex treme soft-focus is not used to create a sentimental aura, but woozy abstractions. In the former the forefinger of a clenched hand has just made a ripple on the sur face of the water. The latter was shot with the camera very close to the earth, so the far distant moon is seen through a crotch in the gnarled aboveground roots of a gi ant tree. In both, the effect is to in vest commonplace subjects with enormous mystery.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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