CONNECT THE SHOTS : Laguna Exhibit Explores Link Between Photos and Drawings

Everybody knows the difference between drawing and photography. But “The Encompassing Eye: Photography as Drawing,” an exhibit of historical and contemporary images (organized by the Emily Davis Gallery of the University of Akron) at the Laguna Art Museum through May 24, suggests that there is a special link between the two activities.

The story starts in 1833, with gentleman scientist William Henry Fox Talbot’s honeymoon on the shores of Lake Como in Switzerland. There he was, poor guy, struggling to draw his enchanting surroundings with a ruler and an optical aid (a camera obscura), and getting more and more disgusted with his amateurish results. When he and his bride returned to England, Talbot vowed to get around the talent problem by figuring out how to let nature do the drawing. Every tourist can thank him for doing just that, by inventing photography.

In an era when landscape drawing involved all sorts of special tools and complicated rules of perspective, Talbot and other pioneers in photography viewed their new processes as up-to-the-minute mechanical aids for artists interested in making accurate pictures of the world. (Talbot’s first book of photographs was called “The Pencil of Nature.”)

The exhibit includes several magical early photographs by Talbot and others, as well as 15 drawings made by Sir John Herschel with a camera lucida (an apparatus with mirrors that reflect the object to be drawn on a flat surface, so its outline can be traced).

In succeeding decades, when photographs were viewed as exact copies of reality, the parallel with drawing no longer made sense. But in the 1920s, some artists--notably Laslo Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray--were using photographic means to exaggerate the play of light and shadow on portraits, emphasize the outlines of objects or produce entirely abstract compositions. Once again, light and photographic chemicals became the artist’s “pencils.”

The exhibition makes a case for viewing certain contemporary photographs as the equivalents of drawing in a variety of different ways. Some artists use photography as a kind of instant sketchbook. Robert Rauschenberg--whose work frequently involves stenciled silk screens of seemingly wildly disparate photographs--uses the camera as a way to keep his visual radar sharp as well to collect information about the world.

Other artists extend the venerable tradition of sketched figure studies with photographic figure studies. The distinguished critic John Coplans has become well known for his extraordinarily searching large black-and-white photographs of portions of his aging nude body--from the creases and pillows of flesh on his hand to the gravitational pulls on his compact and furry torso.

Nancy Hellebrand’s large photographs zero in on scraps of handwriting. Magnified many times in her images, these fragments of lists and messages look like linear abstractions. Zeke Berman’s enigmatic photographic still lifes also employ linear imagery created by stretching wire, yarn and thread in space.

Unfortunately, curator Charles Hagen--whose essay on the exhibit appears in the Fall 1991 issue of Aperture magazine, which serves as a catalogue--doesn’t supply very convincing evidence for the link between photography and drawing in a number of works in the show.

For example, Judy Fiskin uses photography to create catalogues of objects that intrigue her because of what they show about the variable and arbitrary phenomenon of taste. In her series “Some Esthetic Decisions,” she observes the world of amateur flower arrangements, leaving to viewers any conclusions or judgments they may choose to make. Hagen really stretches a point when he likens Fiskin’s tiny photographs--which oblige the viewer to peer closely at them, almost as if looking through a keyhole--to “pages from an intimate sketchbook.”

Hagen writes that both drawing and photography “reflect basic human instincts to depict and record.” He notes that photographers’ manipulation of images (recently enhanced by the availability of computer technology) undercuts the traditional view of photography as a scientific document produced through “the mysteries of chemistry and optics.” But this is hardly news. Any process that leaves a human being free to make choices is going to be much more--and much less--than a straightforward document of “reality.”

Still, the exhibit does offer a number of unusual or rarely seen photographs that are likely to extend many people’s notions of just what photography can accomplish. And where else in Orange County can you see Vik Muniz’s photographic “memories” of old news photographs--such as his bizarre zombie-like re-creation of a photo published years ago in Life magazine that shows an entire movie audience wearing 3-D glasses?

ART LISTINGS, Page XX

What

“The Encompassing Eye: Photography as Drawing.”

When

11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, through May 24.

Where

Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach.

Whereabouts

The museum is at the corner of Cliff Drive and North Coast Highway, just north of the Pacific Coast Highway intersection with Laguna Canyon Road.

Wherewithal

Adults, $3; senior citizens and students, $1.50; children under 12, free.

Where to call

(714) 494-6531.

IN NEWPORT BEACH: WINSOR

Meditative sculptures at Newport Harbor Art Museum (through March 29) document the career of Jackie Winsor. Using a modest vocabulary (spheres, cubes, pyramids) and simple materials (rope, brick, wood, cement), she makes work that invites investigation. (714) 759-1122.

IN COSTA MESA: MULTIPLE VIEWS

At Security Pacific Gallery through March 21, “the frame: multiplied & extended,” offers engagingly complex work in a variety of media by 23 American artists who use multiple images to tell stories, expose divergent points of view or create striking visual rhythms. (714) 433-6000.

IN LOS ANGELES: BELLOWS

At the L.A. County Museum through May 10, a retrospective of the early 20th-Century “Ash Can” School artist George Bellows that includes more than 70 canvases. Bellows’ skittering brush gave a vivacious spin to subjects ranging from New York slums to the Maine coastline. (213) 857-6000.