UMaine show puts focus on ‘Witness’

Lord Hall Art Gallery, a sleek contemporary exhibition area at the University of Maine, is the perfect space for displaying photographs. The place is white and stark with the building’s structural components exposed as part of an overall streamlined effect.

The humming whiteness – diffused natural light – can give the works in “Documentation: Photography as Witness” a penetrating quality. The show runs through March 16, and this is a good time to see it – when the students are on spring break and the parking lot is both nearby and empty. Instead of walking a distance to the gallery, you can reserve your energy for being imaginatively active in the photos.

Curator and UM art professor Michael Grillo is fascinated by the problematic relationship between artistic vision and science, and addresses his interest by presenting the works of seven photographers (two of whom work together).

Barbara Kossy uses her camera to document 360-degree scenes, which she then pieces together in a panoramic collage. Heads and shoulders don’t match up, but that’s the point. These inkjet prints are massive montages of modern life, whether on a cruise ship or in a cemetery in Paris. Kossy is nearly whimsical, but stops short of being kitschy.

In stark contrast are the hyper-busy photo listings of Flounder Lee, who collects her own year’s worth of photos in lines of a poster. Each shot is smaller than, say, a desktop icon, but streamed together, they expose a frenetic maze of nudes, party shots, studio stills.

Bob Kiss’ prints of chattel houses in Barbados are things of beauty. If they glorify shacks that have been the homes of the island’s poor, something powerful and jewel-like still shines through.

They speak both to Annette Fournet’s gritty images of post-Iron Curtain scenery in Eastern Europe and Christina Anderson’s delicate watercolor-style images of Katrina devastation.

In one of Anderson’s gum prints called “End of the Road,” a highway is split like a cupcake ravaged by hungry bear. A lone figure retouched by colored pencil stands on the far side of the road looking back in the direction from which he came. There’s no crossing the Katrina bridge. Both the art and the science remind us of that.

Photographs may capture such moments as they occur, but they also “witness” the vision of the person behind the click of the shutter. These are serious photographers, some haunting, some daunting. Some may even inspire a few hand-held amateurs to turn the frame in a new direction.

“Documentation: Photography as Witness” is free and open to the public 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday in the Lord Hall Gallery at the University of Maine in Orono.