Photographer Suspends Disbelief

At first glance, maybe it’s an island on a clear day, reflected in still water. But then you see that no water is that still. The line between the halves is a little too sharp. Then you see that the bottom half isn’t the same as the top half. They’re not halves at all. It’s a land mass floating in midair.

The image is arresting, stunning, fascinating. What is going on?

That kind of question is part of the fun of ​“Attending to the Ordinary,” an exhibition of Joy Bush​‘s latest, playfully surreal series of photographs, now on view at City Gallery on Upper State Street until Feb. 25. The component parts of many of the images aren’t distant hills or lines of trees on far ridgetops. They’re just the tops of shubbery within walking distance of her house in Hamden. In that sense, Bush’s images don’t simply attend to the ordinary; they transform it.

Bush began taking the photos in 2016 during her daily walks around her neighborhood, or around town. Certain images caught her eye. They looked like ​“anonymous art,” she said, or sometimes like a Picasso. ​“It was a game I played in my head,” she said.

After she had the photos printed out, she had the idea first to arrange them in a grid. ​“Would they relate to each other?” she asked herself. She discarded an early idea to arrange the images by theme as ​“restrictive,” maybe a little self-evident (“here are all circles,” she said). Focusing on form yielded more interesting results, as she sought to discover whether she could make a coherent single image from multiple photos, not by manipulating the images themselves, but simply by putting them in the right place. ​“Can I make it dance?” she asked herself.

Satisfied with her early results, she tried the same approach with other kinds of images — of shrubbery, of water, of clouds. But it wasn’t working.

She took another walk and came back. Looked at it with fresh eyes, and it struck her that she could make the most arresting images using just two photographs, top to bottom. ​“It just came together,” she said. ​“Sometimes you have to do a double-take. You have to take a second look.”

Part of it involved making sure that the photographs played with the viewer’s sense of scale. ​“If you just see the top of a shrub, you have no sense of reference,” Bush said. ​“It could be the top of a mountain.”

But Bush found that she didn’t want to alter the images too much — or even blend the lines between them, which would be entirely possible, but went against the rules Bush had set for herself. ​“If you blend it in, then that’s manipulating in a different way,” she said. ​“I wanted to keep their integrity. It had to be real to me in a way — real and not real.”

Each photograph, to Bush, was ​“individual … but something happens when they come together. It’s reorganizing the ordinary and familiar.”

The juxtaposition of two images to create such a satisfying effect invigorated Bush even as she talked about it. ​“I found different combinations could happen. You could change the whole character just by juxtaposing an image with something else.”

“When it came together, I thought, ​‘this is why I shot the pictures this way,’” she added. After the show’s opening at City Gallery at the beginning of the month, ​“I just went out and started shooting again. There’s more to find. That’s what I like about photography — in some ways, it’s like magic to me.” The kind of magic that lets us see a South Pacific island hiding in the shape of a pruned conifer, a faraway world ready to be explored at our doorstep.

“Attending to the Ordinary” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Feb. 25, with an artist’s talk that day at 2 p.m. Click here for gallery hours and more information.