The Environmentalist & the Traditionalist

The bulb for the headlight in the steam locomotive of my Lionel O-gauge model railroad set had a dimple in it. You dropped a special pellet down the locomotive’s smokestack, it was cradled in the dimple, and when the bulb became hot enough the pellet turned to smoke. And the train choo-chooed its way around and around the plaster of paris mountains, through the plywood tunnels and the sponge tree woods to the plastic towns. So I think I understand the passions that drive the subjects of Sage Sohier’s “Perfectible Worlds” now at the Foley Gallery, an exhibition of 12 medium-format chromogenic prints culled from her book of the same name.Although there is a model railroader in the book, his picture is not in the Foley exhibition. There is, however, “Man in his basement with models of North End businesses, including his barbershop, Boston, MA” (2003). Ms. Sohier has been taking “contextual portraits” — that is, pictures of individuals in environments that reflect who they are — since her graduation from Harvard in 1976. The man in Boston is surrounded in his basement with models of an amusement park, a restaurant, and a street scene, in addition to his barbershop, but he is fixed intently on placing a miniature figure in a model of the beach where he learned to swim. There is a stretch of sandy shore, an expanse of ocean with successive waves, a pavilion, and dozens of figures in bathing suits doing what people do at the beach. Ms. Sohier’s picture captures the focused concentration with which the man places the figure precisely where he feels it ought to be in this reconstrution of his youth.One of the pleasures of “Perfectible Worlds” is the ingenuity with which the photographer illustrates the relationship between her subjects and their worlds. The “Man working on miniature barn, Shelburne, VT” (2004) has constructed a Lilliputian version of an elaborate structure with a peaked roof and dormers, and gorgeous woodwork more appropriate to a formal Renaissance manor house than to any barn I ever saw. The camera lens is inside the barn, which would look life-size if not for the man’s head looming up at the far end through an opening in the floor and establishing the true scale. He wears industrial safety goggles and holds a yellow power tool ready to go to work. The picture reminds me of Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”In “Girl being prepared for a horse show, Sandwich, NH” (2004) it is not the blond, blue-eyed young girl, maybe only 5 or 6 years old, who is the fantasist, but rather the adults grooming her for her performance. She wears a dark blue blazer, khaki jodhpurs, and a white turtleneck pullover with a silver pin of a horse and rider on the neck, and she stands stoically while the grown-ups work on her; a woman adjusts her jacket in back, a man uses a lint remover on her riding helmet, and another woman reaches forward to help. Ms. Sohier has kept the adults faceless so we concentrate on the young girl for whom this being fussed over is more difficult than riding.Other pictures bring us into other encapsulated worlds in which a man builds a ship in a bottle, or presides in a church basement over a Nativity scene that seems to include all of Bethlehem, or dresses in the uniform of a British Redcoat to re-enact the Battle of Concord and Lexington, or applies tanning lotion before appearing in a bodybuilding competition. Sympathy and ingenuity are equal parts of Ms. Sohier’s approach to their “Perfectible Worlds.”* * *The Alan Klotz Gallery has up “Terri Garland: Southern Discomforts,” 51 pictures taken in Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee over the last 20 years. Ms. Garland works in the tradition of Southern photography established by Walker Evans (more than half the images in “American Photographs” were taken south of the Mason-Dixon Line), William Eggleston, and William Christenberry. The hand-lettered sign advertising “Peaches” and the totally faded “Cowboy Sign,” both from Texas (1989), color works with long, straight roads under blue skies mottled with serene white clouds, bring to mind Evans’s romance with signage. “Black Cat, New Orleans, LA” (2006) is a nighttime black-and-white shot of a boarded-up store with a false front similar to many Christenberry took in color. (The cat is hiding to the lower left of the store.) And “Fountain, Drew, MS” (2006), in its simplicity and use of color, is redolent of Eggleston.What is most “discomforting” in these Southern pictures is the eight images of cross-burnings, Klansmen, and white supremacists. What has happened to the young girl in a white robe and conical hat, standing in front of a Confederate flag and holding up a cross, since “Klan Girl” was taken in 1990? The father in “Christian Identity Family” (1993) wears a T-shirt with “White Power” and a Nazi flag on it: Can he really not know the Nazis despised Christianity? And the sense of belatedness when looking at “Torching Cross, July 7th near Tyler, MS” (2007, just last year) refracts into puzzlement as to whether the hooded loons are a present threat to anyone or are simply ludicrous.Six images are not, strictly speaking, photographs. Ms. Garland scanned water-soaked Bibles she found abandoned in New Orleans churches destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Their physical disintegration has given them patinas of considerable interest and even beauty not at odds with their continued identification as sacred objects.“Sage Sohier: Perfectible Worlds” at the Foley Gallery until August 15 (547 W. 27th St., 5th floor, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-244-9081).“Terri Garland: Southern Discomforts” at the Alan Klotz Gallery until August 15 (511 W. 25th St., Suite 701, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-741-4764).

The Environmentalist & the Traditionalist

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