A historian of Renaissance art at Williams, Lieberman is a man who savors solidity, and these are load-bearing photographs. He likes to convey a sense of the density and weight of the past no less than the density and weight of material structure. One way he does this is by placing his subject matter outside of time. He achieves this illusion, in part, by concentrating on human handiwork almost to the exclusion of actual humans. The only people who appear in the show are a blurred couple just inside the frame of a cityscape of Pistoia.
Another way he achieves this effect is by shooting in places like San Gimignano, Florence, Rome, and Venice, locales in Italy where a sense of the past has the thickness of a palazzo wall or cathedral arch. Lieberman is fond of arches generally - of architectural niches, too. Both illustrate the play of solid and void, masonry and atmosphere, that delight his eye and inform his art. Lieberman’s also partial to grandeur, but it need not be all that grand. He’s as excited by a Tuscan barn as a Florentine cathedral. Pho tographing Bernard Berenson’s estate, Villa I Tatti, he fastens on an attic for his subject.
Lieberman does not restrict himself to the past or Italy. Other photographs show Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, a Williams College power plant and a shed situated in front of a grove of trees in Mississippi. That last image, in its strict frontality, is emblematic of the lucidity and straightforwardness of Lieberman’s approach. There is an inherent modesty to these photographs, as well as a seriousness that topples over into severity.
“I am a photographer rather than a painter,’’ Lieberman writes, “because the things I find in the real world that allow themselves to be made into photographs I like have always been more interesting to me than what I could invent.’’
Seriousness is not the same thing as solemnity. The baker’s-dozen images that make up the series “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Smoke Stack’’ are deadpan in execution and frolicsome in conceit. Imagine the handiwork of an industrial-strength Wallace Stevens collaborating with a playful Charles Sheeler: a smokestack peeking over roofs, flanked by clouds, juxtaposed with a tree, garlanded with utility wires, and so on.
Or consider the intrinsic visual playfulness of Lieberman’s photograph of a Carrara marble quarry. The interwining of angles and fissures inebriates the picture plane. Imagine one of Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park’’ canvases blanched and petrified.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
