An Intriguing Photography Show At The Hotchkiss School

Among the artists who have graduated from The Hotchkiss School is Fred Cray, a photographer who displays his multimedia work in galleries and other places, too. 

Cray tucks small images of his work that he prints from home into the pockets of coats hanging in a store, on elevator walls, in a kitchen store’s microwave, on street posters, wherever he is — Brooklyn, where he lives, and all over the world. Thousands and thousands of them are out there, in Europe, Asia and Africa, according to a piece in the metro section of this week’s Sunday New York Times. 

Cray’s work is on view now a bit closer to home in an exhibit with teachers Robert and Sandra Haiko at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery in Lake­ville. It’s a fascinating show.

Sandra Haiko used to photograph with infrared film. It’s no longer available, so she has adapted a digital camera to achieve a similar effect, but it’s not the same, she says. 

“I am devoted to film and the darkroom,” she tells me. “I like to get in there with my hands.” So, many of her pieces in the show are hand-colored archival prints from scanned black-and-white negatives, and her subjects are often rural and, occasionally, menacing: “Stringman,” a ropey scarecrow, is posted in a pale, even shimmery, meadow. But you wonder what lies outside the frame. “The knitter” is a sprawling, leggy creature shot from a high angle, and “Bonehead,” starts with a skull, probably a cow, she figures. The work is refined, imaginative and sometimes pleasantly eerie. 

Robert Haiko’s work has a very different feel. Solid, earthy, sometimes dark. His portraits of students in their bedrooms are phenomenal. Earlier in his life at Hotchkiss, he would teach and then reserve summers for his own photography. But it dawned on him that he was surrounded by subjects every day of the school year. The students. 

So he began making portraits of them in their dorm rooms: Forrest Roraback, ’02, an unnervingly confident subject for an adolescent, is photographed before posters of male movie stars; Dean Flanagan,’88, with a hint of counter-culture attitude, stands on his bedding on the floor next to posters of U2. He looks relaxed but a bit removed. Haiko credits the strength of these portraits to “a kind of sensitivity training. I contact with the person or the landscape before photographing them instead of just wandering by. I think of photographing them ahead of time.”

His photographs of billboards are stunning: in particular “Peace and Pampering,” a tight shot of a billboard, a woman’s head wrapped in a towel as at a spa. She is beautiful, carefully made up and a large section of her chin is peeling away from the image.

So are his images of graffiti on Wooster Street in New York City: dense with print and pics, smacked one upon the other — most riveting is “Wooster Street Doorway (after Arbus),” with an image of one of Arbus’ painful-to-look-at children, this one holding a hand grenade which some artist painted red. Haiko went back repeatedly to shoot these street scenes until the building was torn down.

Finally, there’s a series of Cray’s photographs, much manipulated and sometimes adorned with sheets of ribbon or scraps of cloth.

This show runs at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery in Lakeville through Oct. 22. For information, call 860-435-2591 or go to www.hotchkiss.org/arts.