‘Navigating by Light’ With a Sure Eye at the Helm

In his 1982 photographic portrait of the city of Barcelona, Philipp Scholz Rittermann framed the view with evergreens, whose limbs curve over the scene like a proscenium arch. The time is night. The vantage point is high--a grassy bluff, beneath and beyond which apartment buildings, factories, office blocks and church steeples spread out to a misty horizon. Like a solitary wanderer, or perhaps some feral creature lurking in an urban park, you look out over a scene dense with human habitation yet still remote.

Across the center of the black-and-white picture, almost like an interior horizon, a jagged line of intense white light demarcates an otherwise hidden city street. The bright light acts as a kind of cue, which jump-starts the theatrical scene ( lights, camera, action! ). Rittermann’s picture erupts with scores of illuminations from the darkness, large and small: a solitary street lamp at the lower left; the stacked stripes of windows across an office tower at the right; little pinpricks of white scattered in the hazy distance, which imply habitation in the hills; a Drer-like tuft of grass at the bottom right corner; and dozens more.

The city is at once distant and beckoning. You pull in close, like a human moth to an industrial flame, and peer into the night. Rittermann, through surreptitious and eloquently handled photographic means, coaxes a viewer into replicating the artist’s own contemplative perceptual activity up on that hill overlooking Barcelona.

At the Museum of Photographic Arts here, a lovely mid-career survey of the artist’s work brings together 71 pictures made between 1980 and 2000. Perhaps half the show consists of pictures made at night. More often than not, Rittermann establishes a plane of darkness in the foreground, while flashes, bursts and amorphous zones of light are arrayed off in the distance. Inevitably, they draw you in.

Out of the darkness and into the light--the metaphorical possibilities of photography are carefully exploited, often superceding the specific subject. Barcelona may have personal meaning to the artist, who once lived there, but to the viewer it simply and effectively reads as “city.”

Born in Lima, Peru, in 1955, Rittermann spent his teens and most of his 20s in Germany and Spain. In 1982 he moved to San Diego, where he works today. The survey, organized by MOPA Director Arthur Ollman (himself a photographer who has made a specialty of nighttime pictures), represents the first large-scale study of his work by a museum.

The handsome installation is neither chronological nor thematic, and thus a bit confusing for those who wish to follow the unfolding of the artist’s career. Still, despite obvious differences between, say, the 1984 interior of a warehouse whose bulging roll-up door looks oddly like a pregnant belly, and a 1990 twisted pine-trunk that hugs the desert floor in Arizona, recalling nothing so much as a dancer in frozen motion, there is a sense of continuity to this work. The absence of dissonance in the installation suggests strong threads of continuity over the two decades being surveyed.

Rittermann’s work loosely clusters into three groups. From 1980 to 1989 he concentrated on night scenes, usually photographing urban or industrial sites. Next came landscapes, often taken in the desert north and east of San Diego, and south to the Baja Peninsula. (There is less of Ansel Adams in these Western landscapes than there is of John Divola, who always makes you aware of photography’s inevitable abstractions.) Finally, since 1997 Rittermann has made sequential panoramas, lining up a dozen or more photographs that record at least a 360-degree view. (Examples of this work are also included in “The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West,” the exhibition currently at the Huntington Library in San Marino.)

As the images of a “pregnant warehouse” and a “dancing pine” suggest, connections can easily be found between groupings, whether industrial or natural, photographed at night or during the day. An interior view of the massive, steel-ribbed hold of the Exxon Valdez, photographed in dry-dock during construction in 1985 (four years before the infamous Alaskan tragedy), creates a dark-edged tunnel of rhythmically ordered space. Surprisingly, this same format is virtually reiterated--albeit in a wholly different way--nine years later. “Path Through Trees, San Simeon” (1994) replaces industrial steel plates with tangled underbrush to unexpectedly similar effect.

On the surface, Rittermann’s sequential panoramas would seem to be considerably removed from the earlier work. Finally, however, aspects of time that are only implicit in the nighttime images are made explicit in the panoramas.

Like the Barcelona photograph, a luscious picture taken beneath a railway overpass in Hanover, West Germany, in 1981 would have required a lengthy exposure. Using a tripod and view camera, Rittermann photographed in the wee hours only with available light. In the middle of the night, when human activity is at a low ebb, the stillness of the scene is enhanced by the lengthy accumulation of time required to absorb enough illumination to produce an image.

The smiling faces in the commercial billboards scattered beneath the railway overpass grin at an absent audience, whose past presence at the scene is recorded in footprints and tire tracks left in the snow. The view is at once contemplative and elegiac, while also punctuated with a peculiar sense of imminent arrival. Time warps.

It does again in Rittermann’s sequential panoramas. Scanning the area around Hoover Dam, 15 photographs take in the rocky landscape, a parking garage, the highway that traverses the Art Deco colossus in the distance and more. The dam, the parking garage and other elements turn up more than once, because in making the panorama Rittermann rotated 540 degrees--11/2 times around. Changes in the scene have taken place in the time it took to photograph the sequence, such as a subtle shift in light and shadow or the more obvious movement of passing cars and trucks.

Lined up in a row, the sequence of pictures makes you assume that they were taken in succession, one right after the next. Nothing in the pictures, though, offers confirmation of that conjecture. Perhaps the first and 12th pictures were taken on a Monday, while the eighth picture was taken the following day--or week, or even month. There is no way to know for sure. Even the repetition of the cars in the parking lot could be deceptive: Perhaps they’re owned by workers at the dam, who park in assigned spots every day.

All but three of the works in “Philipp Schotz Rittermann: Navigating by Light” are gelatin silver prints. Color, when it’s used, seems mostly inconsequential; it helps distinguish between spent rifle shells and other rocky debris on the ground in a minimally interesting image of a shooting range.

So far, black-and-white serves Rittermann best. Typically he photographs with a shallow depth of field. The slick surface of a photograph can be the medium’s chief liability, reducing it to the humdrum quality of dry visual information. Here it’s transformed into a richly patterned, visually tactile field of blacks, grays and whites. Coupled with their large scale--the Barcelona picture, for example, is 30 by 40 inches--Rittermann’s photographs often compel with an authority more commonly associated with paintings.

Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego, (619) 238-7559, through Oct. 21. Open daily.