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Addison/Ripley’s “Click: Space & Time” is ambitious, aiming to show how photography represents “two-dimensional space at a fixed instant in time.” It’s not a particularly original theme—-and I’m not sure many of the works even address it—-but never mind. There are plenty of fascinating images to see here.
The great D.C.-based photographer Frank Hallam Day offers a monumental, wide-angle diptych (shown above) whose strong visuals—-a run-down block drenched in graffiti—-still pale in comparison to a carnival sideshow called “Shoot the Freak.” Meanwhile, another D.C. great, Maxwell MacKenzie, reprises some of his signature barn studies from Otter Tail County, Minn., this time arranging them in an two-by-two matrix that calls to mind Bernd and Hilla Becher‘s architectural images.
Ivan Sigal’s three-image series of Kazakh drinking buddies get blurrier as the men get drunker; elsewhere, an anonymous vintage print of a woman, enigmatically distorted, intrigues. E. Brady Robinson documents the Holy Land Experience, a Christian theme park in Orlando; some images are Martin Parr-inspired deadpan photographs of park visitors, but her image of a miniature Biblical scene (shown below) is compellingly disorienting.
Painter and photographer Dan Treado contributes a selection of photographs from the series “All My Friends Are Prizefighters” (shown below), a conceptual art project whose subjects combine old-fashioned boxing poses with less-than-traditional physiques. But the show’s most alluring image—- by Thomas Annan, a Scottish photographer (1829–1887)—-is also the oldest. His “Near M in Aguila (Observatory Sky Photo)” depicts a lovely array of stars that suggest a scattering of fallen petals on grass. Devoid of any context, it’s an image that embodies timelessness.
The exhibition in on view to July 14 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW.
