“Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor,’’ which runs at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art through Oct. 31, is about home in an additional way. Connor studied at RISD as an undergraduate with Harry Callahan.
The show consists of 69 black-and-white photographs. Connor uses a large-format view camera and makes 8-by-10-inch contact prints, which gives her photographs a very fine sense of detail. She exposes the negatives in her garden, using nothing more technologically elaborate than sunshine. Finally, Connor tones the prints with gold chloride. The result is a very distinctive look: dark, almost sepia tinged, yet with a distinct luminosity.
Light matters a great deal to Connor, even more than it does to most photographers (which is really saying something). The almost unnervingly beautiful “Moonrise, Clouds, & Star Trails, Lake Tsomoriri, Ladakh, India’’ is like a poem to light. Nearly a quarter of the photographs in “Odyssey’’ are from Ladakh, near the Tibetan border and a center of Buddhism. It’s clearly a touchstone for Connor.
For all her love of light, Connor is alert to the power of darkness visually. All the photographs in “Odyssey’’ have dark frames and mattes. The walls are dark, too — brown, almost to the point of purple. The effect isn’t at all gloomy. Rather, it lends the two galleries a sense of repose and gravity. These are not images to hurry past in search of famous faces or incongruous juxtapositions. Further encouraging contemplation is Connor’s putting wall labels at the end of each sequence of photographs, rather than with the individual image. Evocation, not explanation, is her aim.
