The Curator's Eye: Henry Art Gallery

Lies of the Mind

There aren’t many photography experts on a par with Sylvia Wolf in the nation, let alone Seattle. The Henry Art Gallery director previously headed the Whitney’s photography department, taught at five top U.S. art schools and curated blockbuster shows devoted to everyone from Irving Penn to Robert Mapplethorpe.

Her latest opus is The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age (Prestel, 2010), a book as bright as an iPad, due to morph into a Henry show within fifteen months. But you can plunge right now into the imagery of sixty-odd photographers who prefer code and algorithms to old-school silver halides. “They’re artists who use digital technology in the service of their imagination,” says Wolf. “It’s not like me with my point-and-shoot or iPhone.”

Take Noriko Furunishi’s Untitled (waterfall). At first, it looks like a beautiful Art Wolfe nature photo. Except it’s bigger than Shaquille O’Neal, and it’s not a soothing sight. “It messes with our sense of perspective – every time we move an inch, the artist has positioned us in a different place in nature,” says Wolf. “It’s like you’re hallucinating. Which way is up? The river seems to be flowing in two directions at once. The vanishing points seem to be in two or three places. At the bottom, it looks like we’re about to tip over the edge.” The picture urges us to take the plunge. “It asks us to rethink our idea of what a camera does. It approximates what our memories and dreams are like.”

After 170 years of photography, says Wolf, “It’s time to take a snapshot of where we are now.” •