Barns, Bees And Considerably More In HCC’s Photo Show

There is a disappointing uniformity in the annual Housatonic Camera Club exhibition and sale now at Noble Horizons in Salisbury. While most photos are competent, some exceedingly so, they most often show the expected, the usual. There are fields and flowers and landscapes that only hold your eye when the photographers have captured something arresting or have used technique to make us see the familiar as new.

But surprise can be found.

Lazlo Gyorsok focuses  his infrared camera in “Old Barns” and “View of the Hills.” Drained of regular wavelength light, the images are dominated by dramatic gray and white clouds, ominous instead of peaceful. You may think Gyorsok has caught the moment before a huge thunderstorm breaks.

Birgitt Pajarola’s travel photos are brightly, intensely colored, like Indian saris. They are saved from banality by her focus on interesting human subjects caught unaware. “Just a Job” is a clever composition with a sand sweeper sitting on the ground, broom and dustpan in hand, at the famous, eastern entrance to Petra, Jordan’s rose-red architectural treasure carved from stone beginning in the 4th century B.C. 

Pajarola captures the contrast between menial worker and tourists as well as the towering walls that give the narrow canyon entrance its dramatic play of light and shadow.

Ann Dillon Wilkinson is exhibiting a suite of five images of trees. The best two show stands of birches, one full of old trees, one of new. The tall, slender trees are leafless, looking like arboreal sentries: unbending, always at attention.

As usual, the abandoned farms and industrial buildings that dot our area appear in the work of several photographers. Bert Schmitz, from inside a derelict factory, shoots a tall water tower through a huge window of square glass panes, many missing or broken with jagged edges. It is early morning, and behind the tower the sun rises, giving the green tree leaves a golden glow. His coloration and light remind me a little of Avery Danziger’s masterful images of the abandoned psychiatric hospital in Wingdale, NY. 

Brian Wilcox’s “Chase Farm” catches the long, low, wide building and its silo in snow. Light and shadows make unusual stripes in front of the building.

One of the few exhibitors to have fun with her camera is Marsden Epworth, who shoots in black and white.    

“Shell Game” is a witty, cerebral play on those words: three shotgun shells, half a cracked eggshell, a tiny pistachio shell and half of a large oyster shell are placed on a tabletop and dramatized by carefully controlled shadows and slight reflections on the tabletop. “Hey Girl” shows a young woman’s leg, shod in a quite-urban leather ankle boot, behind the wooden slats of a horse stall, with hay bales in front. Every detail stands out. Again the control of light and shadow is key.

And then there is Jeffrey Breitman’s “Ribbon Sea,” an image filled with pinkish-red cloth strips tied to short poles sticking up from something. 

Water? Land? I have no idea, and no explanation is given. But it is a terrifically mysterious picture.

The Housatonic Camera Club Annual Exhibition and Sale continues, weekends only, through Feb. 15 at Noble Horizons in Salisbury, CT.