Photography

WHEN Stephen Perloff launched The Photo Review in 1976, it was a golden age for photography in Philadelphia. More than three decades later, he thinks a new golden age is dawning here. "We're getting back to the energy and vibrancy of the earlier time. It's quite heartening," said the self-taught photographer, whose publication has kept him at the center of all things photographic in the region. Philadelphia today has three community photo art centers: Project Basho, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and the Light Room.

A two-dimensional, black-dotted dressing table leans against the stairwell of Penn State Ogontz's library. The dressing table's mirror reflects an empty highway winding through the mountains. Upstairs, in another picture, a boy walks along a modern city sidewalk amid lush green foliage and the frescoed ruins of ancient Pompeii. This is photography? Instead of celebrating the 150th anniversary of photography with a look at the past, the Ogontz Library Gallery is exhibiting the cutting edge of this medium.

Works Gallery, which showed photography in its early years, has returned to the medium with an exhibition of recent works by Dick Kagan, a former woodworker who once operated his own gallery on South Street. A chronic back condition forced Kagan to give up woodworking several years ago. He turned to photography, and this show, of 12 black-and-white images made in Italy last year, marks the introduction of his new career. The series is called "Light Studies," and that describes them perfectly.

In its variety, this dog show is rich. Not an actual dog show, mind you, but a traveling exhibit, "A Thousand Hounds: A Walk With the Dogs Through the History of Photography" at the Delaware Art Museum's temporary home on the Wilmington riverfront. This theme show has a thread to follow. Well thought out and put together in 10 sections by curators Raymond Merrittand Miles Barth, the event has been given a historical structure. There are few gallery exhibits where the note of affection for a subject is struck more genuinely than it is here.

Haverford College has one of the most impressive photography collections in the region. And, to celebrate the 150th birthday of photography, the school is displaying some of its best. For the next month, 120 works from 102 photographers will be shown at the school's Comfort Gallery in a show that offers useful historical perspective on this art form. Many sesquicentennial shows have looked at the early years of photography but included little if any current work. Faculty member William E. Williams, who put together this show, deserves credit for making the effort to include strong contemporary photos.

As the century draws to a close, and photography celebrates its 150th birthday, there has yet to be a definitive historic review of Montgomery County photography. Judith A. Meier is attempting to rectify that by providing an exhibit, "Early Montgomery County Photographers," at the Historical Society of Montgomery County. This serves to bring public attention to people who worked in relative obscurity. The photographers featured are distinguished by their choice of subject matter.

The bear hug given photography by the Print Club's latest "annual" starts the New Year off on a bright note. Photography has never developed in a straight-line way, but has grown like Topsy, with the people along its various fronts not very knowledgeable about each other's work. So, competitive group shows are occasionally useful for exploring the broad range of current activity; they inform photographers themselves as much as the general public. The current event is the photography exhibition of the Print Club's 63d Annual International Competition.

A group show by three dissimilar photographers of Netherlandish background is featured at the Holland Art House in West Chester. Front and center are large-scale surreal landscapes by Gabriel Stillwater, a Colorado-born resident of Washington who trained as a painter in the Flemish Renaissance tradition in the Netherlands, where he lived until last year. Stillwater's work demonstrates the inability of the camera to tell even a significant part of the truth that we might expect from photography.

"Photo-Synthesis" at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts is a relatively small exhibition about a large topic - recent innovations in photography, especially those that involve advanced technology. It's not a show likely to surprise anyone conversant with how the medium has evolved over the last decade or two. Many of the technical and stylistic innovations by the 17 artists in the show have been exposed elsewhere. In this regard, "Photo-Synthesis" is typical of exhibitions that circulate among small, second-tier museums and art centers outside of major urban areas.

Bruce Katsiff remembers being asked, sometime around 1990, by the board president of the James A. Michener Art Center if he would be interested in running the organization, which had recently opened on the site of the former Bucks County prison in Doylestown. To that point, Katsiff had been chair of the fine art department, and more recently the art and music division, at Bucks County Community College since 1975. He was ready for a change but, as he remembers, "I had no interest in running an arts center.

IF ANYONE should understand a big-picture concept, it's a guy who focuses on photography, right? Say hello to Basil Malik, a future lensman at Communications Tech and a 5-9, 150-pound guard for the basketball team. The spunky lefty has served as the sixth man through much of his junior season and, thankfully, he knows and respects the deal: Though not everyone can start, all who appear can surely contribute. Saturday at St. Joseph's Prep, in a game that was lively throughout, CT bested Bishop McDevitt, 55-53, for the Class AA City Title.

Members of the Stetson Shutterbugs stepped outside their middle school in Kensington and began sizing up the late afternoon sunlight slanting down on bustling Allegheny Avenue. "Take a look at the way the light is now," teacher Anthony Rocco told the students in his photography club. "You get some really strong shadows. " Clutching donated cameras, the young teens set off down B Street to take pictures of the neighborhood to share with their "photo buddies" in a tiny town in Colombia.

Michael Morrill, a prominent Pittsburgh abstract painter, is introduced at Seraphin Gallery in his first Philadelphia solo. A teacher of studio art at the University of Pittsburgh, the Yale-trained Morrill became an artist when the reductive aesthetic of the 1970s, not the more austere minimalism of the 1960s, was emerging and combining itself with painterly enrichment - something that characterizes his distinctive handling of this method. I'd say Morrill keeps half a foot in the reductive camp, while his paintings emphasize their expressive option with brilliance.

WE GIVE A hearty thumbs-up to whatever smart person decided that it was time for a Zoe Strauss photography exhibit (at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until April 22) and two thumbs-up for Strauss herself, who thought of displaying her images on 54 billboards around the city. There are many wonderful aspects of this very public, very temporary way of displaying art. First, we wish more billboards were devoted to art and fewer to strictly commercial messages. We need more presence of art in our lives, and billboards are a great canvas for high-impact works; it's a perfect way to have art confront us where we live, rather than confined to the walls of museums and galleries.

WHEN Stephen Perloff launched The Photo Review in 1976, it was a golden age for photography in Philadelphia. More than three decades later, he thinks a new golden age is dawning here. "We're getting back to the energy and vibrancy of the earlier time. It's quite heartening," said the self-taught photographer, whose publication has kept him at the center of all things photographic in the region. Philadelphia today has three community photo art centers: Project Basho, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and the Light Room.

Zoe Strauss, camera dangling from shoulder, stands in the Acme parking lot at the convergence of Passyunk Avenue, 10th and Reed Streets. Her blue Sixers cap and olive-green parka blend right in. The orange Adidas? Not so much. Surrounded by officials from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a chattering flock of reporters, Strauss is at the heart of an unlikely cluster for this part of town. But nothing seems to faze her. Everyone in the group is looking up, at a billboard on the roof of Lime Organic Cleaners on the other side of Passyunk.

'Learning to See," Nancy Hellebrand's photo exhibition at the James A. Michener Art Museum, sets forth changing assumptions about American landscape photography - not for her just another traditional view of the natural world. To accomplish her impressive aim - learning a new way of seeing and presenting landscape simply, in a series of large-scale color photos - is perhaps beyond anyone's ability. Yet taken as a kind of shorthand, the display by this Philadelphia-born photographer, who has been exhibiting internationally since 1973 and working in color digital photography since the 1990s, is both instructive and pleasurable.

PHOTOGRAPHY may be the most familiar artistic discipline - every day we see photographs in newspapers, on Facebook, on billboards along the highway. Although most photography aims to document, not all photos are so explicit. Some photography provides us with a view of everyday objects and scenes so abstracted that we may not even recognize them. This month, LGTripp Gallery explores photography's multiple perspectives with "Focus," its fourth annual Abstract Photography exhibition. "Abstract photography is fueled by the desire to take an object and remove it from its original form," said Luella Tripp, gallery owner and curator.