New Haven Independent

His eye-bending work in optics and in the ancient technique of camera obscura, which he renders anew, are featured in an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibit, called “Behind the Seen,” is tripled with “Everyday Monuments: The Photographs of Jerome Liebling” and a kind of joyous inadvertent survey of photography from the mid 19th century to the present, “From Any Angle: Photographs from the Collection of Doris Bry.”

If the price of gas is keeping you in town, and you want to be indoors on these light-filled days of summer, this triple-header celebration of the art of light, which is photography, bears coming back to several times.

The whole first-floor gallery is given over to Abelardo Morell, a Cuban-born artist now in mid-career and teaching at Yale, who’s best known for eight-hour exposures to capture camera obscura images (the inverted image that seeps via a peephole into a darkened box or room), on which he superimposes yet other images, in gestures of hommage or irony or both.

Curatorial intern Christine Paglia points the way (along with co-organizer, on the far right, Anna Hammond, the gallery’s deputy director) to a real exposure going on in the corner of the exhibition. There, the artist, in a work in progress, has the image from the construction of the new Yale art building on York Street, real time images, accompanied by real time audio too, entering the room through a hole and a prism and being slowly photographed — eight hours worth of slow.

In other images, the artist seems to have traveled the world to capture a camera obscura Coliseum as it appears in the room he has rented, #20 at the Hotel Gladiatori in Rome. There’s Venice as well as Times Square and many more — including non-camera obscura images such as a shadow of a pyramid superimposed on an old printed images of them (“Old Travel Scrapbook: Pyramids”). In each instance the juxtapositions create dreamlike, surreal effects that, are both visual paen and, well, pain in the sense of stretching the instrument of perception.

“When Morell discovered camera obscura,” said Paglia, “he said that he felt as if re-discovered photography.” In new work, such as this photographic merger — or is it hostile takeover? — of Edward Hopper’s “Rooms by the Sea” and Elie Nadelman’s “Classical Head,” Paglia writes in the fine accompanying guide that Morell is “fusing the media of painting and sculpture through the medium of photography.”

Upstairs, on the fourth floor, the Liebling and Bry exhibitions more than complement Morell and should not be missed. (Full disclosure: This reporter is married to one of the gallery’s curators, who, however, is not directly involved in these shows.).

If the Morell is a view of artist in mid-career, the Liebling is a kind of intuitive retrospective of Jerome Liebling’s six decades of photography, beginning with images such as “Butterfly Boy,” 1949, which elicit what the curators, including Pamela Franks, Deputy Director for Collections and Education and the students who assisted, called the meaning of everyday life, or the monumentality of the quotidian.

Whereas Morell’s work has no humans in it and celebrates a kind of cerebral monumentality of things, Liebling, while never eschewing formal concerns, is full of the monumentality of people.

Franks said that when the student curators first suggested to Liebling, now in his 80s, that thematically they saw his work as a kind of descendant of Jacob Riis and the reform-minded documentarians of the earlier part of the century, Liebling objected. “But I love life,” he said.

Might his switch to color photography in recent years reflect a change of mood? Franks wasn’t sure, and emphasized the through line in this artist’s career of a creative tension between grit and nobility, the physical and the spiritual, the said and the unsaid, and much else. He, for example, has done a series on famous artists’ and writers’ houses, such as this 1984 chromogenic print called “Melville’s Desk, Pittsfield.”

“The camera,” Franks said, “is tilted above Melville’s blotter, just so.” She said Liebling wasn’t making any commentary on the author’s nervous habits, perhaps picking away with his nib to combat his famous writer’s block. “He’s suggesting that the marks reflect the kind of unseen creative journey, the tension behind the creation of a novel like Moby Dick.”

Once you’ve seen a photographer in mid-career (Morell) and one with a full career arc (Liebling), the third exhibition offers an appreciator/collector/insider’s perspective. Doris Bry, Georgia O’Keeffe’s agent and confidant; it is from her collection of some 200-plus images that “From Any Angle” was created by Yale students.

Bry is also a scholar of the pioneering photographer, and partner of O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz, captured here in a “Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New York,” a 1929 photo by Paul Strand in the exhibition.

Co-curator (with Franks), Ash Anderson, said that during a life of service to practitioners, Bry collected “inadvertently” but with such an excellent and practiced eye, and with joy and pleasure, that a walk through these galleries is like a tour of superb survey of 19th and 20th century photographic art, with examples from the work of Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Irving Penn, Garry Winogrand, and many more.

There are also photographers Anderson himself knew little about such as Todd Webb, whose “Paris, 1949,” (to Anderson’s right above), and which he looks forward to studying and writing about in the future.

It’s fitting that the curators learn, as well as the students, since of the three shows, two have been student-curated in keeping with the university’s re-doubled commitment, since the gallery’s Kahn building reopened, to use its first class collections as a teaching tool.

And for teaching the public as well. For gallery hours and more information about lectures, programs, and other events connected with New Haven’s exceptional summer of photography at Yale, email here or call 203-432-0611