Hazy Shades of Winter

by John Haber

I had to think, even if just for a moment, where the photographs of Dietmar Busse ended and where those of Roger Ricco began. I knew that one shot in northern Germany, the other on a tabletop. I knew that both rely on a medium that purportedly accepts direct impressions from nature. How strange, then, that photographs by the first could pass for a fantasy, the second for the earth in winter.

Perhaps I simply had to get past Busse's leaping horse. Its silvery motion and the frame, which isolates its head and forelegs, make it seem to have sprung to life from a long-cherished children's book. Ricco's own long exposure—of a small animal skull, like a pendulum in motion—looks much more at home in a rural landscape. Perhaps I had to stop thinking of Ricco's mold or dust bunnies as swirling snow. His restricted means, illuminated by a single light bulb, also have much in common with winter, when life slows to a halt and the meager sunlight descends from a harsh angle. In his settings, with no obvious mark of scale, a twig could reach higher than a tree.

For Busse, a thin coat of snow may have fallen half as freshly as dust, but it textures the unyielding winter soil. It picks out a road seen in perspective, like the unyielding trapezoid of Minimalist sculpture yet unknown. Photos of trees with and without snow, paired at opposite ends of a wall, resemble the arbitrary permutations of conceptual art. Busse does well to shy away from obvious metaphor, except for that horse. He seems content to work from the materials that nature puts at hand, not spinning out winter narratives of childhood lost.

When it comes down to it, that literal-minded spirit unites the two photographers quite as much as their subject matter. Ricco began his series in another kind of exile—laid up indoors, remote from the city, recovering from a motorcycle accident, but without help from Bob Dylan and the Band. The spare stage sets available to him and Busse's spare winter fields help account for the similarly narrow range of color in both. Both must have appreciated returning to New York in spring.

Ricco could easily have hammed it up, too, more than even the skulls of rural ecosystems demand. A bare bulb sounds much Billy Wilder's formula for film noir. However, he prefers to explore his means, to bring out the texture of shadow rather than its starkness. He has the greater concern for illusion, but he has fewer big stories to tell than Busse—and less obvious concern for their ending. He avoids symmetry in his props or backdrops, to the point that the ordinary shape of a table never shows. Busse, in contrast, likes frontal compositions and the pressure of a tree or road against the picture plane.

Their shared exhibition did not intermingle the two artists, but it did not keep them on facing walls either. To keep them apart, I had to look twice. Art is supposed to make me do that, but it is more unusual for photography to do so, apart from digital or other trickery, and I should never mistake this for trick photography. The gallery has a fondness for both displays of skill and old-fashioned beauty, as with intriguing opening shows of Makoto Fujimura and Duston Spear, but I liked this pairing most for its lack of manipulation. What you see is what you get. It just may not look like winter.