ART REVIEW : Toying With the Limits of Photography

One hundred and fifty years ago, France’s Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre and England’s William Fox Talbot elaborated on the 13th-Century camera obscura to give birth to photography. In a cleverly subversive anniversary celebration, the Long Beach Museum’s “Enlarging the Repertoire: Jerry Burchfield and Charlene Knowlton” (to March 5) toys with conventional limits of photography.

We expect photos to be small; these artists make mural-size works. Photography is a record of actual events in time; these artists create contrived realities using state-of-the-art techniques as accomplices. “Pure” photography should involve subject, camera and a keen eye; this work results from lots of props and a multimedia approach.

A widely exhibited fine-art photographer and former co-director of the photo gallery and laboratory called BC Space, Burchfield spent a good decade mastering every possible trick to help photographers hawk their wares. This he decided was anything but a “record of truth,” so he abandoned the camera, the staged shoot and the darkroom for what he calls a spontaneity and higher truth more akin to the goals of painting.

Burchfield works with sheets of chemically sensitized Cibachrome paper joined to make huge photo “canvases.” He places bodies, skeletons, toys, debris and necklace charms directly on the treated paper. Working in total darkness, he then traces objects with a flash light. Dense objects register as dark, detailed stencils in intense hues. Other objects let light through and have an ethereal transparency. Light limns poignant war toys (“Above and Below”), temple-like geometries (“Refuge”) or life-size marauding consumers (“Commodification/Shoppers”).

Themes are contemporary--parenting, gratuitous violence, commercialism, isolation--but the smoky violet, purple, blood-red atmospheres, the shadowy after-images and pockets of intense light give works the same transcendent feel of Ron Cooper’s light torsos. Especially fine is “Last Supper,” with Burchfield’s squating wife, his infant and human bones invoking archetypal and temporal cycles.

Trained as a painter, Knowlton makes photo-environments. She paints nude, masked models with her own monochromatic, geometric designs, places them in front of her large painted abstractions, photographs the whole scene, then enlarges the print to mural size. Using wax, oils, dry pigments in blacks, whites, browns, she paints primitive markings back onto the mural print, binding all levels of information--hands-on, replicated, contemporary, native--into one ambiguous whole.

Knowlton uses photography to translate her message into the language of today’s media culture. “People are trained to believe photos,” she says. She wants the near life-size photos of masked, hunched nudes and Western cars to collide with abstract marks, thwarting quick cultural generalizations and suggesting connections between tribal art and contemporary art, non-Western cultures and our own world view.

The strategies in “Enlarging the Repertoire” aren’t new. In the ‘20s, Pictorialists used soft focus and cropping to push the limits of photography into fine art. With 60 years of photo-technology and anything-goes art to draw upon, Burchfield and Knowlton pull in painting, happenings, performance art and conceptualism. If you take your photography with nothing on it, you’ll learn something from this show; if you welcome a good helping of deft experimentation, you’re in for a treat.