A couple in the throes of sexual embrace, surrounded by darkness, the letter X hovering above them.
The image of the Tower of Babel juxtaposed with raindrops on glass and the O's and X's of a computer screen.
A man's hand holding a fountain pen that has just written the letter I juxtaposed with the image of a snake charmer piping a tune to a swaying cobra.
What do these black-and-white images, photomontages, mean? You find your own meaning, whatever you want them to mean, photographer John Schlesinger told a recent visitor to the home he shares with his wife in Powelton Village in West Philadelphia.
"Enigmatic" is the way Harris Fogel, chairman of the Media Arts Department at the University of the Arts, described Schlesinger's somewhat surrealistic photographs. The viewer gets a strong sense of "unfinished narrative," in the way art opens questions instead of simply answering them, Fogel said.
Schlesinger, 45, is one of 35 winners in the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 1999 biennial competition, chosen from 360 nominees. The awards are given to artists - in painting, sculpture, print-making, photography, crafts and video - whose work shows promise but who have not yet received widespread critical or commercial recognition. Aside from the considerable honor of the thing, the award includes a grant of $20,000. After the loss of individual grants to artists by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tiffany Foundation grant has become one of the largest individual-artist awards in the country.
Actually, Schlesinger has received considerable recognition from critics in such publications as Art in America, ARTnews, the Village Voice, and the New York Times. He's had solo exhibitions in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Tampa and Greensboro, N.C., as well as in Amsterdam and Groningen in the Netherlands.
Where does Schlesinger get some of these bizarre images he uses in his photographs?
He goes to the movies.
He sits in the front row, snaps pictures of the screen with his 35mm camera, a 1928 Leica, rewinds the film, then goes to another theater and does the same. Or perhaps he shoots scenes from real life - an industrial landscape, body parts, a trapeze artist in a circus, whatever. Then he splices the negatives, tapes them together and prints them as one negative.
