Eve Sonneman at Bruce Silverstein

To achieve an effect popularized by the proliferation of scenic photography and the commonplace parlor entertainment of the stereoscope, the photographer at mid-19th century employed a camera with two lenses set apart at a distance equal to the space between human eyes. Considered separately, the resulting images differ slightly because of the lateral shift of lenses, and, when mounted together in a stereoscopic viewer, they produce the three-dimensional effect of binocular vision. Arranged as diptychs, with one panel in each pairing related to the other in form and content, the vintage black-and-white, color and SX-70 Polaroid prints assembled in this survey of Eve Sonneman's photographs suggest the stereoscopic experience, at the same time bringing to mind the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins.

This thoughtful survey of photographs dating from 1968 to the present emphasizes the fact that Sonneman has maintained her early interest in paired images. Because her views are sequential, when seen side by side they illustrate the passage of time rather than simulate the illusion of depth. Sonneman's subjects, their code of dress, the location of their encounters, invite readings that may remain in part ambiguous. The viewer, like the photographer, intuits the moment between images, even anticipating the next to come. The couple snapped in the black-and-white Sunday Bathers, San Francisco (1968) demonstrates an awareness of the camera's presence; in the frame to the right, the woman smiles at Sonneman's intrusion. Arrested in motion, the protagonists of Coney Island Couple, New York (1972) are also silhouetted against the afternoon sky. The woman seems to move toward the photographer, and in the middle distance, like a partner in a dance, the man stretches his arm to balance his progress, his knee raised in motion, a jaunty hat perched on his head. One image flows to the next like words in a text.

As years pass, Sonneman's frame of reference shifts. In the chromogenic July 4, 1976, New York (1976)--an image that anticipates the compositions of Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky--she locates a group of photographers high on a bridge overlooking the pleasure craft and tall ships of an afternoon made memorable by time and place. The camera operators and their equipment move, and Sonneman, located somewhere above them and following their jockeying for place, moves with them.

Most reductive, the sheet of discarded paper that figures in Newspaper, New York (1980) is arrested as it tumbles in dappled shadows. Increasingly tuned to process and intervention, Sonneman recently began to insert painted poles or balls of indeterminate size into SX-70 diptychs of ordinary New York street scenes. Not quite useful as measurements of scale, they could be understood to serve as surrogates for her own presence in the cinema of daily life.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group