Detlef Orlopp’s black and white photographs are not conventional landscapes and seascapes but moments of nature in two dimensions. Expanses of rock or water defined by light and shadow, texture and pattern, his images are virtually devoid of depth. There is none of the Sturm and Drang of the great outdoors, no plunging perspectives or distant horizons, not even the most rudimentary clues of scale to tell us that “here” is closer than “there.” What is left, once all the scenographic trappings have been cropped away, is nature as presence rather than setting: the grainy ridges of a mountainside,

In the paintings of Raymond Saunders, black is a world. Not the mystico-cerebral universe of Ad Reinhardt, or the folk-historic reality of Jacob Lawrence, but an encyclopedic world of visual encounters: with still fifes and greeting cards, with children’s drawings and book illustrations, with graffiti and Japanese calligraphy, with memory and chance. It is the world of an African-American wanderer who claims (with reason) that he can make the color “sing.”

For Saunders, the vast black surfaces on which he works—usually painted canvases but also blackboard slabs—function not as neutral backgrounds