Framing Light Without Heat

Photographs can be made without good reason, without any ostensible subject and without much care or sensibility, but they can’t be made without light. Light is the catalyst, the engine, the fuel of every photographic image. It can be present in artificial or natural form, but it must be present. It delivers the wake-up call to slumbering silver salts or, nowadays, to the dormant codes of digital “film.”

In the group of Richard Ross photographs on view at the Orange County Museum of Art, light is both reason and subject. For the last 10 years, Ross has used the camera like a straight pin on a corkboard to collect specimens of light. Each is exquisite and unique, but for all the passion requisite in their collection, these luminous incidents come across as coolly dispassionate in their display.

Each of the two dozen color prints is large enough (about 4 feet on each side) and vivid enough to feel like a physical invitation. The architectural spaces feel nearly continuous with our own space; we stand, it seems, at the edge of each room, at the cusp of each passageway. The spaces themselves are largely vacant except for light--in beams, throbs, flickers, searing fields and radiant pools.

Ross shot the Temple of Ananda in Bagan, Myanmar, from the outside, where its sooty, stone-carved exterior dramatically offsets a golden passageway inside. The stairway down, with its ceiling of receding pointed arches, radiates golden light. It beckons with warmth and promise.

The delicately tiled bath at the Red Fort of Delhi is pictured with solemnity and something akin to reverence. All is dim and still but for a dusting of light that drifts to the floor in a circular pattern of dots, like powdered sugar sifted through a doily.

Ross’ photographs of a cathedral in Spain, a temple in Laos, an ancient bath in Israel and a fresco-lined chamber in Pompeii are similarly still and pristine, haunted as much as vivified by light. Nearly half of the images represent sacred spaces where, paradoxically, light makes palpable the spiritual function of the place.

The rest of the pictures in the show, which originated at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., frame spaces of a different sort, museums mostly, but also a ferry landing in Italy and a storage room at a movie studio.

Ross has been photographing in art and natural history museums since the 1970s. As repositories of cultural and historical meaning, those institutions might be considered sacred spaces. Ross has long tempered his reverence with canny humor, irony and an overall sense of disjunction that teases prickly questions out of even the most orderly, placid environment.

The museum pictures here have little spark, however. A gallery at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu (Ross is principal photographer for the museum’s Villa Project and the Getty Conservation Institute) is empty but for a puddle of white light on the hardwood floor. The image is spare but underwhelming.

Slightly more intriguing is a view of a room in the Getty Villa under repair, where rubble heaps around a hole in the floor, a secret shaft to a mysterious underworld.

A few photographs hint at faded glory by quietly exposing surface decay in the museums’ otherwise elegant settings. These and some behind-the-scenes shots reveal a certain messiness at odds with the polished facades that museums typically present to the public.

These pictures, though, lack the savory friction of his earlier museum work. They also fall short of the harmonious beauty of the images of sacred sites, falling instead into a visual limbo of the big, beautiful and benign.

The show, “Gathering Light,” is accompanied by a catalog with a pithy introduction by Dave Hickey and a provocative essay by Eduardo Cadava. But Ross’ pictures (also on view at the museum’s South Coast Plaza gallery) have a hard time measuring up to the writers’ poeticizing.

In spite of their grand scale, the photographs, even of sacred sites, feel slight. Regardless of their concentration on the ephemeral, fleeting, intensifying power of light, both their insistent frontality and their square format make the pictures appear static. Light is all that’s needed to make a photograph, but it’s not enough: necessary but not sufficient.

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Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (949) 759-4848, through March 31. Closed Mondays.