Two of the “Four Photographers” at Bertha Urdang deserve at least a mention, even an honorable mention. They are Barbara Sonneborn and Sherie Scheer, both of whom toy with the photographer’s illusion of reality the way a cat toys with a mouse.
Sonneborn’s large color-prints do so by a calculated pairing and balancing of visual effects in what seems to be a casually arranged scene. Next to the matte blue walls and the motion-blur of an oscillating fan blowing a diaphanous curtain, the sharp, precise shadow that a ladder casts on white paper becomes so intense that it detaches itself from the scene. In a way these aren’t photographs at all, but sculptures that have to be seen from the camera’s special point of view to be appreciated. The layering, curving and placing of the sheets of paper is particularly deft and mysterious. It makes some pictures take on the appearance almost of photograms. My one caveat is that these works are remarkably like some that David Haxton showed last year at a gallery in Soho. I’m not accusing Sonneborn of copying his idea, or even of being aware of it. Perhaps she was doing this kind of work before he was. No matter who got there first, the fact is that novelty counts in contemporary art, and in photography above all. It’s as hard for two photographers to occupy the same imagery as it is for two physical objects to occupy the same space.
Scheer’s nearly full-circle color panoramas are more complicated. Most were made of very ordinary scenes of an Iowa farm—the barnyard, inside the house, etc. But each combines at least three kinds of rendering and two different media. Being panoramas, each of these photographs includes every intensity of light, from some areas that are deep and rich to others where paleness or brightness have almost blown the color away. In the latter areas Scheer might insert a piece of a black-and-white print of the same part of the scene, while elsewhere she crudely paints over a section in oils that make the color resemble tinted 19th-century post cards. These distortions of color play off against the distortions of space that the panorama creates, and make a dense, full image out of all that empty Midwestern prairie.
—Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr.
