From Paris to China to space, a shift in focus

The show, which consists of 18 photographs, runs at the Danforth Museum of Art through May 3.

Alter has consciously violated the rules of architectural photography. A traditional architectural photographer, emphasizing proportion and bulk, knows that the building is what matters and makes sure it dominates the frame. With Alter, who teaches at Framingham State College, the building still dominates - but so as to subvert its visual authority rather than magnify it. He never frames a building, for example. Rather, he frames elements of it - a wall, a set of steps.

The pictures are large, a few as big as 48 inches by 48 inches, and in color. The color makes the buildings seem less oppressive. A bit of purple graffiti off to the side in a photograph of the Grand Arch, the centerpiece of La Defense, is like an oasis of humanity - much more so than the solitary man seen trudging up the arch's steps.

It's people who matter to Alter, and there's nothing human about the scale or appearance of these buildings. The only relief comes from the occasional planting. The sight of three birches in front of blank blue panes or a set of bare, pollarded branches before a white curtain wall is like glimpsing another, far more familiar Paris.

Abelardo Morell also takes something on a big scale, the planet, and frames elements of it - very substantial elements: the continents. They're the subject of the seven large cliche-verre pictures in "Continental Drift," which runs through May 17.

For these pictures, Morell has set aside the technique he's best known for, use of a camera obscura, which produces inverted images. Instead, he's coated glass plates with layers of ink, as he says in an artist's statement, "to form interesting tonal densities." When the ink dries, he scratches out lines and exposes the plate to photographic film of the same size. He then prints the resulting negative onto photographic paper.