Pinhole images from magical to menacing
Central Europe has a longstanding tradition of dark enchantment: tales of the golem, the writings of Kafka, the early films of Roman Polanski. Both darkness and enchantment, as well as an arresting combination of visual past and present, are on display in "Made in Poland: Contemporary Pinhole Photography," which runs at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University through March 4.
Many of us will recall using pinhole cameras in school; they're a classic way to demonstrate the principles of optics. Send light through a tiny aperture and a small inverted image will appear. Project the image on some photo-sensitive material, and a photograph can be made (though it will require a long exposure time).
Pinhole cameras were known to the Greeks and Chinese some 2 , 400 years ago. But the six photographers whose images make up "Made in Poland" are working today. The resulting blend of the ancient and contemporary lends their photographs an outside-of-time quality. Depending upon the photographer's emphasis, the images can recall a fairy tale, horror movie, or both.
The spooky unnaturalness of Jaroslaw Klups' self-portraits, which he calls "Selfforms " is a case in point. Or there's Edyta Wypierowska , who distorts perspective and size in her still lifes of such everyday objects as balloons, cherries, and playing cards. All her images include a checkerboard pattern motif. The black squares give a sense of threat to the images. Their presence also gives Wypierowska a baseline darkness on which to ground the phenomenal tonal gradations she achieves in her pictures.
Andrzej Bogacz also uses common items -- a pair of eyeglasses, an elephant figurine, a pair of sandals -- which he charges with otherworldly meaning. The squat black form of a rotary-dial telephone could be an illustration for Philip Larkin's great meditation on death, "Aubade, " where "telephones crouch, getting ready to ring/in locked-up offices, and all the uncaring/Intricate rented world begins to rouse."
Magic rather than menace informs Georgia Krawiec's images of nocturnal Warsaw. Her work is slightly surreal kin to that of the Czech master Josef Sudek . Krawiec's titles evoke the soft-focus dreaminess of her work: "Camelot Dungeon I, " "Palace Aquarium I, " "And on the eighth day." The last title is for a photo-montage of Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science that makes a monument to bureaucracy look like a child's storybook castle.
The four images from Marek Noniewicz's "Light-sensitive sendings" series are glowing sci-fi snapshots, almost impossible to describe: "Blade Runner" circuit boards? Lego DNA strands? They have a striking, one-of-a-kind quality, whereas his four "Self-portraits inside camera obscura" simply seem mannered.
A display case contains examples of the photographers' equipment -- cardboard boxes, a candy tin -- which in their charmingly mundane way are as bewitching as the entire show is.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, the number of photographers in the group exhibition "Made in Poland," which was reviewed in Saturday's Living/Arts section, was incorrect. There are seven, not six.)
