Small Photos, Big Message

Are those jeans? Tires? Tattered prayer flags? Or just twisted metal bones from a decaying retail skeleton?

You can see it in any of those ways in photographer JoAnne Wilcox’s ​“Deconstructing Macy’s.” That photo — taken as New Haven tore down the old downtown Macy’s three years ago to make way for a new Gateway community college campus— sparked much discussion at the opening of a new exhibit called ​“Small Works, Big City.”

The exhibit, curated by Jennifer Jane, is inside the Arts Council’s headquarters on the second floor of 70 Audubon St. An opening bash took place Thursday night.

The photos on display range from the bold, sparse splashes of Sven Martson’s collection on Merida, Yucatan, to the shabby timelessness of Tom Strong’s ​“Nine New England Churches.” A rambling collection in both geography and style, the exhibit succeeds in fulfilling the promise of its title: Within each frame, one small scene, with the lighting or the cropping done just right, seizes upon pre-existing sensory memories and allows the viewer to unfold an entire urban landscape from there.

Success for Wilcox means capturing those scenes immediately. She spoke at the opening about a morning when she was so eager to pull over to take a picture in the appropriate light that she spilled a bagel onto her clothes. ​“The light was right, and the next day it’s gone,” she said. ​“When you see something, you have to go with that instinct.”

Robert Lisak, in his ​“Six Cities,” manages to use his instincts to pack a streetscape full of presence into prints barely larger than a postcard. His black-and-white images from six different U.S. and European cities transport the viewer into individualized collections of stone, trees, and water. He plays with our sense of direction by composing some shots with houses above and others with bridges towering on the horizon. Because he sticks to these aged materials of man and nature, we always feel rooted in history and location.

“I think the variety and diversity of the subject matter is a real tribute to the curator,” said Steve Kovol (pictured, right), the owner of Hull’s Art Supply and Framing, while glancing from Lisak’s collection to the romantic colors of John T. Hill’s Milan and Florence beside it. (Hull’s framed about half of the photographs in the exhibit.) He mentioned that he had seen a few other exhibitions by Jane in the past.

“This,” he said, pointing to the walls around him, ​“is the coup de grace as far as I’m concerned.”