Earlier this week I saw Anna Gaskell’s photography exhibit Turns Gravity at the Yvon Lambert gallery in Chelsea. Her photographs were in black and white and they immediately reminded me of works by the great B&W photographers of the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the photos were of people, mostly children, in natural settings. A couple of them were shot in the snow. The high contrast between the children dressed in black, some in formal attire, and the white snow was striking. A number of shots were framed to include only parts of the body, especially the lower portion of running legs. In one photo, the frame in effect beheads the child at the neck. The children play with great energy and the body parts often are brimming with excitement. However, the overcast winter skies and the ruthless framing suggests that the children’s happiness will shortly be truncated.
In some of the photographs the children's positions are overtly staged, and the effect is surreal. It’s as if the photographs are the images in the mind of someone longing for his or her lost childhood. The hazy image of a child, as if shot from an early box camera in the late 1800s, is one such photograph.
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