Lake Affect: Photographs by Othello Anderson
Disciplined, carefully delimited approaches to nature photography yield a revelatory diversity in two exhibitions. Shooting in color, Othello Anderson has been recording a single view of Lake Michigan since 1980, leaning against the same tree at the Fullerton Avenue beach and photographing waves, clouds, storms, sunrises, and twilights in all seasons. Shooting in black and white, Barbara Crane has taken overhead shots of mice, birds, skeletons, sticks, and other items she’s found since 1987 near her cabin in southern Michigan, positioning them against a black velvet backdrop in her studio. Despite these restrictions and the artists’ adherence to traditional genres, Anderson’s landscapes and Crane’s still lifes are exercises in surprise. Has anyone else cataloged so avidly the spectrum of color and texture displayed by lake and sky? And who else has so carefully noted the luxuriant delicacy of a mouse pelt or bat wing?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
For “Lake Affect” Anderson has propped up untitled 11-by-14-inch digital prints on narrow wooden shelves at City Gallery, in the old Water Tower. There are a total of 280 images, 4 per shelf and five rows of shelves in each of 14 groupings. The sequences offer no obvious narrative, diurnal or seasonal. Perhaps the vast range of atmospheric conditions overwhelmed any idea Anderson had of imposing a formalist grid on his inventory. Given all the recurring phenomena, “Lake Affect” defies useful sorting: layered bands of various colors reappear above and below the horizon, and the textured surfaces run the gamut of crusty ice, rippling waves, and sunbeams glinting on the water.
While all of Anderson’s photographs are horizontal, Crane opts for a vertical format in most of her project, “Still Lifes / Natures Mortes,” represented by 55 photographs at the Chicago Cultural Center. Shooting 4-by-5-inch and 8-by-10-inch negatives, she makes gelatin silver prints, most of them 24 by 20 inches. Crane collected her subjects between the little towns of Coloma and Covert–though I wonder if she made an exception for Monkey Hand, 1999. The scale of some of these objects is distorted by her treatment: Crane enlarges them beyond life-size and frames them in uniform formats. The monkey paw appears just as tall as the dead mouse in a 1994 print, with its whiskers at the top of the frame and its tail curling at the bottom. In four prints from 1999, hair balls coughed up by Crane’s husband’s cat, Ashley, are on the same scale as the mouse and bird carcasses.
