It Was a Snap

Teacher, teach thyself is the motto Frederick Kuretski has adopted.

One of the founding faculty members of Cal State Northridge’s film department, Kuretski enrolled in a photography class. Five years--and about 30 academic units--later, he has landed his first gallery show.

Kuretski had taken photographs before, starting in the late 1960s when he worked as an apprentice to photographer Arthur Sinsabaugh. But he got sidetracked, first by writing, then documentary filmmaking--he made very political films about South America in the ‘70s--then teaching.

But even once he got back to photography, he wasn’t peddling his wares to galleries. In fact he was having his pictures framed, thinking maybe he could hang them in a coffeehouse. It was his framer who called Robert Gino, co-owner of Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks.

“When he brought in his portfolio, I fell in love with it,” Gino said. “I didn’t want to wait to book him because I knew he had a great body of work already.”

Though Kuretski teaches cinematography, he found still photography an almost entirely different beast. Photographs have to capture relationships--between people or objects--in an instant of time. Cinema, on the other hand, reflects those relationships over a duration of time.

He hasn’t totally severed his photographic style from filmmaking, however. His show at Orlando contains several photographic series, such as the black-and-white collection “Domestic Politics.”

The pictures, all taken in an empty apartment with a real-life couple, imply a movie storyboard. “It doesn’t quite tell a story, but it suggests one,” Kuretski said. “And it seems that you could make a story if you tried hard enough.” The meaning, though, shifts with the order of presentation: a break-up becomes a reconciliation.

His other large series, “Particles,” are abstract color nudes in extreme close-up. First done as 4-by-5-inch prints, Kuretski created larger (16-by-20-inch) versions for the Orlando show. “I’m not sure what does it, but scale is making a big difference,” Kuretski said.

Indeed, the small prints for “Particles” draw a viewer in for closer inspection, but the larger ones are more aggressive. They challenge a viewer to put the pieces together, to solve their abstraction (is that a hip? a shoulder?). Assembling a whole body, though, is an impossible task.

Kuretski’s next project returns a little to his documentary roots. Under a state Research and Sponsored Projects grant, he is taking portraits of recovering alcoholics in their workplace. He hopes to assemble the large-format platinum prints in a book with writing based on interviews with his subjects.

In the meantime, he’s still a professor and a student. Next quarter he’s enrolled in fine-art photography. Last quarter, he said, “I just took an incomplete in an independent study.”

The classes have changed some of his thoughts about teaching film, too. Now, he encourages all his film students to take still photography.

“The role of the single image--I’m really sensitized to that.”

BE THERE

Photographs by Frederick Kuretski, at Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday through July 28. (818) 789-6012.