A look at animals, real and unreal

February 04, 2010|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

WINCHESTER - Through March 28, the Griffin Museum of Photography becomes an outpost of the animal kingdom. Some of the creatures to be seen there are under water. Others have lived only on the page. A few seem to be waiting outside a psychiatrist’s office. Whatever the locale, there’s nary a picture with a human or human handiwork to be seen in any of the three shows currently hanging.

“Dark Sharks/Light Rays: Photographs by Karen Glaser’’ offers a titular hat trick: It simultaneously rhymes, puns, and describes succinctly. The rhyme is obvious, the pun less so - the rays are the kind that swim in the ocean as well as those that reach the eye. As for the description, 15 large photographs of sharks (the pictures are 2 feet by 3 feet) line the walls of the Griffin’s main gallery. And dark they are: sinister silhouettes of grainy texture shown moving through an underwater murk. The sheer otherness of the watery world Glaser captures is breathtaking.

There are hammerheads, white sharks, whale sharks. They look brooding, weighty, minatory. They’d get more than just a squint, a lot more, from Sam Quint, the shark hunter in “Jaws.’’ “Shark Surge Down,’’ for example, shows a flotilla of hammerheads seen in descent. It’s a spooky and overwhelming image.

The sharks seem to be circling the other nine photographs in the gallery, which show rays and are hung on temporary walls. These images are lighter and finer - “printed like graceful etchings,’’ Glaser says in an artist’s statement. They’re also appreciably smaller, 6 inches by 9 inches. The rays look like positives to the sharks’ negatives. They also seem somehow to have escaped their fluid medium and taken to the sky. In “Light Rays,’’ from 2007, they look like moths or butterflies; in “Ray School,’’ like a flock of birds in flight. The overall effect is of delicacy and airiness. It’s both liberated and liberating. Glaser speaks of “a realm where natural history gives way to the ineffable.’’ Her photographs open windows on to that ineffability.

The point of departure for Laszlo Layton isn’t beyond the shore but between covers. He takes vintage natural history illustrations and photographs them with antique soft-focus lenses. The results are renderings of renderings, images of great charm and refinement, with a unique temporal trajectory. The original illustrations date from the 19th century. Layton photographs them with the equipment and aims of such early-20th-century Pictorialist photographers as Clarence White or Gertrude Kasebier. And the result, with its layerings of time and technique, is very much a product of our own era.