# Two Shows, Six Artists - a review of two photography shows



## The_Traveler (May 10, 2014)

*This review is published at my blog at here*

What an unexpected treat to see, in one weekend, two shows with artists who each have both the vision and the skills to carry it off. Of course I liked some more than others, thought some individual pieces rose above the rest but, all in all, every work was the obvious product of careful thought and skill.

Every time I do a review, because I know nothing, I must take a steep climb up knowledge mountain. Because one of the shows was entitled 'the New Pictorialists' and the other was Silver Visions  Images photographed with Large Format Cameras', I anticipated a re-visioning of the famous friction between the Pictorialist movement of the beginning of the last century and the Modernists (most famous for the f64 group (You know big camera, everything in focus from your toes to the horizon, larger than life.)

The Pictorialists had moved away from the dull documentary style that marked the initial years of photography and emphasized a romantic kind of work that engaged the senses. Then along came WWI and social documentary photography, straight photography and the even more precise Precisionists  and the battle was on, and for some time the Modernists won.

But it wasn't all that clear cut. 

If you read A World History of Photography by Naomi Rosenblum, a tome thicker and more complex than Finnegan's Wake, you'll find that there are innumerable off-shoots and movements and groups forming and dissolving as the normal evolution of photography as an art is distorted and accelerated by the concomitant advances in the technology of photography.

I went to the show, formally titled 'The New Pictorialists' with some expectations. I had researched on the two artists showing on the web and was anxious to see their work in person. As it turned out, it was not for me to riddle out where these two fit in the stream of things, it was very clear  and not really very important. These two were both as far from any emotionless documentary work as one could get and still have some representational elements. Although they are both 'landscape artists', they had agreed before the show that Cathy Leacraft would show works of smaller scale and Karin Klinedinst larger more 'traditionally scoped landscapes.'

An excerpt from Cathy Leacrafts (Home Page) artist statement describes her work better than I could. _My current artistic focus is the use of reflections in glass to create layered images of landscape, thus pushing photography into the realm of abstraction._
_I create these images on location, bringing reflective and refractive objects with me. I work intuitively, moving around my glass construction, looking for the view that depicts the emotion and beauty I seek to convey. The process is about letting go of labels like tree, sky, house, and allowing things to become shapes and color. By using reflections I am able to capture vivid colors and unusual abstract views of my subjects.
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*The remainder of this review contains embedded pictures posted with the artists' permission and may be read *_at _http://lewlortonphoto.com/blog/2014/5/review-six-artists-two-great-shows


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