Doug Prince Photographs

Carl Solway Gallery
Cincinnati

The gallery is a small, plain, white room. It contains 14 black and white prints and 15 three-dimensional pieces that look like tiny, freestanding windows. The prints are beautifully crafted, seemingly straightforward pictures of slightly improbable, subtly disquieting events. Each of the “windows” is comprised of several photographic images on separate, transparent panels. Each set of panels is illuminated from behind to create a condensed space in which the varying motifs they represent blend in unexpected ways. Both the silver prints and the glowing, three-dimensional pieces are full of quiet mysteries and gentle tensions. These little allegories, expertly fabricated from assorted visual fragments, confront the viewer with the internal logic/illogic of dreams. Rich with suggestion, these composite images avoid, for the most part, overt theatricality. The virtuoso techniques employed in both the prints and the sculptures remain subservient to the photographer’s desire to evoke a world in which illusion and reality are fluidly intermingled.

The prints convey a curious sense of hovering between the believable and the implausible. They seem simply to take note of events that are just outside the realm of the ordinary. (A woman stands casually alone in a dark, misty lake while lightning strikes a distant mountain.) One might almost be persuaded that the photographer has the good fortune to witness extraordinary incidents in commonplace circumstances. The events depicted range from the readily acceptable through the unlikely to the absurd. (A large tortoise moves alone through a shaft of illumination in an ancient street of stone palazzi.) Whatever the elements employed, they are seamlessly blended technically and psychologically. The artist skillfully exploits the viewer’s intrinsic belief in the truthfulness of photography. (Beneath dark water, a swimmer approaches the viewer; the motion of an empty canoe sends ripples across a still lake at evening.) Insofar as they might be called surreal, these images are closer to the more subtle paintings of Magritte than to Dali’s fantastic distortions or the nightmare visions of Ernst. (A large stone stands in one track of a dirt road through snowy land while geese fly overhead.) The technique of printing multiple negatives to create a single image has rarely been practiced with such grace and sensibility. These images maintain a superb balance between simple observation and the elusiveness of mirages.

The trans-illuminated, three-dimensional pieces provide a sense of peering into deep pools of consciousness in which several images overlap. (Two dolls sit in small chairs, a pair of dragonflies above them; between them a fern stands on a pedestal in front of two windows that look onto a cloudy sky.) Whereas literature is constrained by linearity from presenting several images simultaneously, these little boxes blend objects, space, and time in ways that lure one away from language-bound thought into the realm of visions. (An antique doll in a long dress floats above a neo-classic bed before walls of clouds.) Layers of images intermingle in the eye, and everyday objects are transposed to the realm of fantasy. (A rose with a letter and an envelope are suspended above a woman sleeping on a bed in a room, which dissolves into a formal garden.) These visual polyphonies bypass the practiced expectations that are generally brought to the viewing of photographs. The objects pictured are recognizable. We know we are looking at photographs. Their meanings, however, remains elusive. (A negative image of a woman’s face in profile appears in an open window of antique design; through it we see a flock of tiny birds flying before the looming domes of St. Mark’s in Venice.) Whereas photography is most often used as a means to suggest objectivity through precise description, these images exploit the medium’s capacity for allusion and intimation.

Doug Prince has chosen two different methods of using still photography. They differ not only from one another; both diverge from conventional modes as well. Combination printing and “stage direction” have been hotly debated issues in photography since the Henry Peach

Robinson vogue of the 1850’s. With a few notable exceptions, they have been out of favor ever since. The best-known contemporary magician of composite photography often tends towards wanton melodramatics and a profusion of pseudo-symbols. Prince, however, exercises a subtlety, a persuasiveness, and a quality of simple elegance that may help to restore these approaches to respectability.

The extension of photography into three dimensions has met with little more than a collective yawn from most quarters despite a variety of excellent work by several distinguished artists. It may be that traditional approaches to the medium are too firmly entrenched, or that they simply seem sufficient, while the use of space is seen as an unnecessary gimmick, even somehow anti-photographic. It is certainly more difficult to exhibit such work than it is to hang prints on a wall. (The Solway installation is exemplary: a piece of gallery craftsmanship that reflects and complements the artist’s own highly refined skills.) Regardless of the reasons for limited experiments in three-dimensional photography, Doug Prince is one artist who has explored it with consummate skill and refreshing intelligence.

Sean Wilkinson
This review was published in the magazine, “Dialogue”, in 1983. The original text has been slightly revised.