Fusion infusion

Photographer Susan Bowen packs a universe into a city street




BY GREGORY CROSBY

During the earliest part of photography's development, the panoramic shot was one of the new medium's sought-after images, a part of the vocabulary of camera work -- whether it was created by patiently stitching together multiple exposures or by the few specially designed (and bulky and expensive) panoramic cameras. As cameras became cheaper and photography the province of everyone, the panoramic disappeared from view, replaced on one end by the snapshot and on the other by the art print. Only in recent years, when panoramic features became standard on many cameras, did the panoramic shot -- now able to render a scene either horizontally or vertically -- become rediscovered as one of the many tools for capturing the world.

But you don't need a special panoramic feature to catch the wider vistas of life. All Susan Bowen requires is a $20 plastic camera called a Holga, with a single F-stop and shutter speed. By partially advancing the film between exposures, Bowen creates elaborate, overlapping images, turning the film strip itself into a very wide panorama.

Bowen's experiments, her reinterpretation of the New York cityscape, are now on view in Urban Fusions at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery.

I say "experiments," because Bowen has no idea what she's getting as she advances each frame; how or where the individual frames will melt and blur into one another, what faces or facades will inhabit the other's visual reality. Chance plays the major role in her art, and many of the pieces in the show are clearly the result of many rolls spent on the same scene, as with the works concerning a Chinese New Year's celebration or a political protest march. In these, the mass of revelers or dissenters jostle one another as if caught in the refraction of a prism. These photos capture the press and surge of street crowds -- but of all the subjects in Bowen's show, I found them the least compelling. In this instance, Bowen's technique is a distraction from what she documents, and while these long, horizontal images stretch the eye they also oddly cramp it.

Bowen's overlapping of imagery is better served when there are a few figures in the frames, as in the marvelous skater landscape "Skateboard Park, Arms Up" or the dynamic tension of people swirling past one another in "Canal Street." In truth, Bowen's technique only offers up a simple kaleidoscope effect when she turns her camera on parades. But when she turns her eye to architectural elements, the interaction of steel and concrete with glass and sky, she creates some very arresting works -- particularly "Reflections to Go," in which the reflection of a skyscraper is folded and curved over and over like a frozen wave in the rounded surface of a parked Volkswagen Bug; and in "Graffiti," where the thick, red, cryptic squiggle of spray paint loops endlessly into the world's longest, continuous and most mysterious tag.

The standout is "42nd Street," a piece that surely pleased Bowen to no end, for in it all the color and clash of Times Square's signs and architecture is reassembled into a nearly perfectly balanced composition of the dynamism of urban life. The forms charge past the eye like the wheels of an express train.

Such a piece is inspiring to devotees of the urban aesthetic and budding photographers alike.

That's perhaps the best reason to visit Bowen's show: the knowledge that her simple technique, with its attendant possibilities, is available to anyone with a cheap camera and a few rolls of film. Bowen's Urban Fusions make you want to get out on the streets and try for your own energetic and seductive panoramas.

Susan Bowen's Urban Fusions

Reed Whipple Cultural Center

821 N. Las Vegas Blvd.

702-229-4674

Through Aug. 15

Free