Writing with Colors
By Matt Spangler

The assumption, when taking a photograph, is you click the shutter, allowing light to instantly expose the film. A decisive moment, frozen in time, no chronology unraveling, no plot development. "Still photography," it's called.

But at the bottom of all those fractions on the shutter is a solitary letter: "B," as in "bulb." In the old days there used to be a physical bulb tethered to the large format cameras draped under the sheets that also hid the photographers' heads. Today you select the B and the action around you is transmogrified into a brush stroke on canvas.

Or rather, the emulsion can become your stone tablet. Hungarian Bauhaus photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy called it "writing with light," and he used it to great effect to create, to cite one example, free-flowing swirls of incandescence from traffic and street lights he passed in the Chicago night.

2001 Corcoran graduate Christine Carr has devised her own blend of light-writing by bringing the light to the camera, rather than the camera to the light.

In a series of pristine box-mounted prints currently on display at Newman Gallery & Custom Frames, she has removed the shutter from her Holga camera to capture everyday subjects - a notebook laying on a table, a robe dangling above a bathroom scale, a crumpled letter planted next to a tangle of cords and wires - but she then invites a dazzling display of pastel colors into the frame, which she constructs by flashing a series of gel-covered lights into the shot.

Carr calls the series, from which three of the four prints featured at Newman are culled, "Awakenings," in deference to their therapeutic function as a means of coping with inner demons. Her one-time fear of public speaking is manifested in the furniture tableau; the cold realization of the fleetingness of friendship becomes the balled-up epistle.

It is a world out of balance, though, framed by irregularly shaped vignettes that she fashions by attaching a simple washer to the Holga's lens. Suddenly the bathroom still life explodes through an ebony sea like a supernova, but the Technicolor kaleidoscope of hues ensnared in darkness somehow eerily evokes the scenes that the Wicked Witch viewed through her crystal ball. Carr welcomes the analogy, musing about the time she was on a fellowship in Germany and came close to painting a tree-lined path yellow to capture a little bit of Oz for one of her landscapes.

The most stunning of the quartet on display at the gallery is the only sample of her new work, which makes use of transparencies that melt into their polychromatic environs. In this case the centerpiece is a slide of an old print of her mother projected in a corner. Here she has chosen to bathe the object in a singularly ethereal ruby glow, but she has also dotted the scene with a pack of balloons. When blurred due to the long exposure, they could just as well pass for a lens flare, but the overarching effect is of the spirits, or the memories, summoned by this interloper from the past. "Photography has something to do with the resurrection," said Barthes, and perhaps it is a rebirth this print is calling for.

Photographs by Christine Carr will be on exhibit at Newman Gallery & Custom Frames, 513 11th Street, SE, 202/544-7577, through September 12.