In 1993, Sarah Charlesworth completed “Natural Magic,” her first series of photographs made entirely in the studio. By that time, she had spent almost two decades collaging found images to expose and manipulate the ideological structures that underpinned photography, crafting series such as “Modern History,” 1977–79, for which she excised the text from the front pages of newspapers so that the size and position of the remaining images—of statesmen or a solar eclipse or a masked Sandinista guerrilla—laid bare a visual grammar of power. Likewise, in “Objects of Desire,” 1983–88, Charlesworth placed mass-media photos of religious icons, animals, and the female body against supersaturated backdrops of solid color, decontextualizing commodity and sexual fetishes without fully divesting them of seductive force. Yet if the eschewal of photographic appropriation in “Natural Magic” marked a fundamental transition in her practice, the series—comprising eleven photographs and shown here in its entirety for the first time since 1993—nevertheless retained many of the most recognizable elements from previous projects: the high-gloss Cibachrome prints with matching lacquered frames, the frequent use of veils and draped satin, the isolation of an object against a monochrome ground, the collapsed sense of space.

For “Natural Magic,” however, Charlesworth was not only behind the camera; she was in front of it, performing a series of magic tricks for the lens. She inverts goblets, bends forks, makes smoke appear. In Trial by Fire, 1992–93, flames leap from her gloved hands. The rest of her body is in complete darkness—a fathomless, pitch-black background—so that the hands seem as spontaneous, as unfettered, as the fire itself. There is something beautifully perverse about Charlesworth’s insistence that she actually perform these complicated tricks, which would have been far easier to portray by cutting and pasting preexisting images. The trick may be a deception, she seems to say, but it is not a fabrication. By extension, the photograph is neither fully constructed nor merely an instrument that records. We expect Charlesworth to perform such a sleight of hand —to photograph the magic trick to confirm a truth of the medium even as she questions it with her legerdemain.

In fact, the gambit portrayed in Trial by Fire is one of the gimmicks exposed in Letters on Natural Magic (1832), written by scientist David Brewster, who notes that monks and ecclesiastics likely saved themselves from the flames by applying special balms to their hands. (It is wholly plausible that Charlesworth would have been alerted to Brewster’s text by Jonathan Crary’s 1990 book Techniques of the Observer.) Brewster aimed to expose the tricks of mirrors and chemistry in order to loosen the grip such illusions could have on the uninitiated masses, “the prostrate vassals of power and superstition.” Charlesworth’s series, by contrast, basks in the interweaving myths of magic and of photographic truth. From the witty nods to darkroom techniques such as burning and dodging to the double exposures of gleaming silver goblets, the works in “Natural Magic” freely mix “control and abandon” (to reference the title of one of the works), letting the artist savor the roles of both magician and deceived.

—Rachel Churner