Music for Pictures

By Matt Spangler

It’s been a hidden desire of mine for some time to make my photographs sing. Okay, maybe I don’t expect a mass of silver halide to jump up and belt out “Ya Got Trouble” from “The Music Man”, but I’d like to see some hi-tech whiz kid invent a portfolio that plays a different tune every time the viewer turns the page. Until technology advances to that stage, Bruce Barnbaum has an answer: give the masses a CD. And so the Granite Falls, WA-based Zone master has done just that with his coffee-table epic, “Tone Poems: Nine

“Quarry at Arni”

“Colorado River”

Each opus is bestowed with a label of some lofty import — no. 2 is titled ’Darkness and Despair,” while no. 3 is tagged “Lyricism of the Land” — and each arrangement of photographs is then married with music deemed appropriate. For example, to suggest the “pain of suffering” of the “environmental battle“ being waged in Opus 2, Barnbaum needed “music of a more passionate, intense, aggressive, and pessimistic character.” So he chose the mack daddy of 20th-century Romantic angst, Rachmaninoff, who contributed his opus 32 for solo piano, to illustrate the theme. It’s actually not an inappropriate selection for Barnbaum’s swirling and serene landscapes of western deserts, canyons, and rivers. The problem ultimately with mating what he calls these “non-verbal

Would that were all there was to the enterprise. Making your way around the haphazard placement of the works in the gallery, one comes across a real puzzler: “Movement in N-Dimensional Space.” It features a faint blur of a female nude in the background, underneath what appear to be a series of fin-like cuts in the paper. Its meaning may be elusive, but what is even more perplexing is why it was included in a show that is ostensibly a collection of nature abstracts.

Barnbaum, a disciple of Ansel Adams, is a technical master. This is perhaps best exemplified in a telephoto shot of Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone. Somehow Barnbaum manages to squeeze some detail out of a scene that is essentially a blanket of whiteness. It is the photographic equivalent of playing entirely in the upper register of a guitar. One only wishes that Barnbaum had applied a similar degree of subtlety to the overall project. I imagine that if Australian photographer Michael Dumlao had his own theme music, it would have to be performed by some smoother-than-silk DJs like the local boys of Deep Dish. At first blush his work seems to be populated solely by the perfectly-sculpted-and-coiffed Venusi and Adonisi that one would be mostly likely to bump into at ... well, clubs and photo receptions.

“Movement in N-Dimensions”

“Cequyna Dreams of Liberty”

But take a closer look and one observes in Dumlao’s work a healthy amount of weight on this model here (“Anna”) or there a pre-made-up face, hair draped in a towel (“Dianne”). Aside from being unafraid of allowing imperfections to seep into his hipper-than-thou world, Dumlao is an accomplished colorist and scenarist. He takes the pensive, vacant stare of “Matthew,” for instance, and bathes it in cool blue light, enhancing his meditative expression. In the show’s pièce de résistance, a red glow seems to burst out of “Cequyna,” perhaps suggesting the emotional state she’s channeling in her seemingly peaceful slumber. In all Dumlao goes beyond merely splashing the fabulousness of his subjects onto the print, instead bringing their inner essences to the fore with his remarkable manipulation of lighting and filtration.

Dumlao has an impressive history of remonstrating against sex and race discrimination. While an undergrad at the University of California he joined a crusade against the school’s unsuccessful attempt to abandon its ethnic and women’s studies programs, and later, while finishing his undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney, he campaigned against its attempt to bring a homophobic group to campus. This comes through in the melting pot of ethnicities and lifestyles that populate his work. A bit of an amalgamation himself — born in the Philippines, he spent his childhood in Australia, and then moved to Southern California for high school and part of college — Dumlao gives equal time in his work to men and women, black, white, and Asian.

“Renaissance Girl”

The overarching note he’s sounding, a critical one for these troubled times, is beauty comes in all shapes, sizes and tones.

ON DISPLAY

Bruce Barnbaum’s Tone Poems will be on display at Kathleen Ewing Gallery, 1609 Connecticut Avenue N.W., 202.328.0955, through March 29. Beyond Walls: Prints by Michael Dumlao, will be on exhibit at Spiral Flight, 1726 Wisconsin Avenue N.W., 202.237.2898, through March 23.

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