Galleries: Robert Asman's photos-turned-into-paintings

Since the late 1970s, Robert Asman's silver gelatin prints of his photographs have been noticed as much for their imagery - which runs the gamut from bluntly uningratiating to ecstatic - as for his artistry with paper and chemicals. Now, a retrospective of Asman's photographs at the Print Center, "Robert Asman: Silver Mine," organized by its director, Elizabeth Spungen, shows off his alchemy as applied to such diverse subjects as city trees, nudes, developing trays, and clouds.

Philadelphia, where Asman photographed and taught for 30 years (he currently lives in Asheville, N.C.), is the subject and the backdrop in his early black-and-white photographs from 1979, many of which capture the harsh lives of trees on urban streets. Later, his trees become obvious metaphors for humans, as in Bondaged Tree, (1992), in which a tree intricately tied with black rubber supports immediately suggests a bound figure. Then again, some of his pictures are as plain and everyday as a William Eggleston snapshot - and not as appealing in black and white.

Asman's nudes, which he began in the late 1980s, are the logical development of his tortured trees but also mark the beginning of his experimentations with chemical manipulations and works made from paper negatives. I wondered if he thought his images of male and female subjects might not be explicit enough - this was after the heyday of Mapplethorpe, after all - but his manipulations add a layer of mystery and darkness that is more sinister than any graphic image. It's hard to look at some of these works and not feel like a fly on the wall at a sadomasochistic tryst.

The trays that hold photographic developer would not seem an obvious choice of subject for anyone, which is probably why I did a double- take when I realized what these encrusted objects were. (I also would not have expected to encounter developing trays posed straight-on like portraits, either - they reminded me of the first time I saw John Coplans' photographs of his own aged body parts.) Asman's developing trays are the repositories of all his chemical experiments, of course, and they look like the surface of the moon and are just as beautiful in their own way.