“HOUSES FOR SALE” January 5-March 2, 2019 at PHOTOGRAPHS DO NOT BEND GALLERY
“Houses For Sale” presents sixty-four photographs of domiciles from various times and locations. In his 2003 photograph “Barrio, Magdalena,” Esteban Pastorino Diaz presents aerial view of seemingly identical houses in a grid formation, but the tilt-shift focus he applies causes them to appear as a miniature model of a neighborhood. Bill Owens’ “Typical Californian” from 1971, by contrast, is taken from a couples backyard. They are sitting at a small table that appears to be located down in an empty swimming pool. The man and woman are having a meal. Above the man’s head, on the edge of the pool sits a large dog, in profile. Ira Wagner’s composition focuses on homes among the crisscrossing of telephone poles and lines, providing framing and depth as they angle and recede. Peter Brown creates an interesting composition in “Texline, Texas” when he take a perfectly centered home, its chimney in the middle of the top of the frame, then alters the symmetry with a woman standing off center against the wall.
Many of the photographers capture not only the structures, but also the interesting people that inhabit those places. Early Hudnall’s photographs are excellent examples. In the 1986 “Street Champion” group of kids of different ages pose playfully for the camera on the sidewalk in front of a house. One young boy in the back row stands out, triumphantly raising the boxing gloves he’s wearing. In “Flipping Boy” from 1983 the street scene is punctuated by an odd form, suspended in the air, that is a young boy frozen by the camera in the middle of a back flip. David Graham seems to have come upon an active scene in “Near Niagara Falls, New York, 1989.” An elderly man sits in a lawn chair in front of a home, to left and in the background in the doorway stands a second elderly man, while up on a ladder near the second story is a middle aged man. All the men focus solemnly on the photographer.
David Graham’s photo is held together through the composition of angles and lines: eaves, the ladder, doorway, walls; but, as in many of the photos, color plays a major role in cohesion. The photograph works through his dominance of red: the red house paint, the Bud logo on a cap, the flannel shirt, and an American flag hanging on the wall. The eccentrically painted house in Paul Sokal’s photograph, “Albany, Texas, 2014,” is not only colorful, but makes one wonder about the colorful person who inhabits the home. Jason Lee captures an ordinary residential scene of a red pickup parked in a driveway, but his attentive eye has caught the visual rhyme of the slat fence that has a large section painted in the same red. “Swedish Red-Comfortably Secure, 2006,” by Joakim Eneroth, is a beautiful large photograph of a large red barn dominating the snowy landscape.
A common theme in many photographs is abandonment. Structures are boarded up and deteriorating. Once vital domiciles are vacant. There is a beauty in these weathered places, but also a curiosity about those that once inhabited them. One wonders what led to the building’s and the neighborhood’s decline. These photographs provide a documentation of what will likely be one day gone.
http://pdnbgallery.com/SITE/housesforsale/
