A view askew

Philip Isaacson’s architectural encounters

By Chris Thompson

BUILDING, ALBEQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO: Philip M. Isaacson, C-print, 2000

It would be nearly impossible to convince a critic that a picture is worth a thousand words. On the contrary, a gallery full of pictures is lucky to receive several hundred. It’s not just that critics know they’d be out of a job otherwise, it’s that the relationship between seeing and saying never stays still. They are two entirely different languages, each with their own grammar, logic, and poetic potential. Seeing and saying take turns echoing, undermining, enhancing, and unsettling one another. Our increasingly specialized world does a good job of seeing to it that fluency in one of these tongues entails illiteracy in the other. On occasion, however, we encounter those whose ability to move between the visual and the verbal enhances the impact of their work in each language.

Many of us associate Phil Isaacson and photography only by way of the black and white image of his smiling visage accompanying his art column in the Maine Sunday Telegram, where he has proffered his own aesthetic experiences for a generation. But in addition to his career as a wordsmith, which he has supplemented by practicing law, Isaacson is also a talented photographer. He has brought his writing and his photography together once before, in a book about architecture entitled Round Buildings, Square Buildings, and Buildings that Wriggle Like a Fish. Ostensibly a “children’s book,” it was acclaimed by a New York Times critic as the best introductory book on architecture he’d ever come across. Isaacson’s ability to make his exploration of architecture’s complexities both inviting and accessible is now on public display at June Fitzpatrick Gallery.

“Fragments” is his title for the show’s 23 color photographs, which date back to 1994. Each offers up a meditation on the visual, psychological, sensual, and emotional charge of the places he has recorded in his travels. In “Cloisters, Monreale, Sicily,” Isaacson focuses upon this dramatic experience of place by looking at the confluence of Moorish and Norman architecture. The encounter between two different ornamental styles, juxtaposed in a play of textures and colors, becomes our point of entry into traces of a distant history of invasions, conquests, assimilation, and resistance.

Isaacson has framed this view in a way that is just slightly off-kilter. Instead of making his composition correspond to the verticality of the column, he has skewed it. So, rather than bear the weight of the massive stone archway, his angling of the column gives it a sense of weightlessness that appears to puncture the picture plane instead of reinforcing its two-dimensionality. This turns what could have been one in a seemingly endless series of columns into a singularly sharp, piercing note. And it turns up the volume of the contrast between the sandy white, stone-hewn architecture that commands the foreground and the dark cavern of the colonnade beyond it.

Everywhere, Isaacson takes his compositional cues from his subject matter’s subtle visual details, from changes in line, color, and texture. His two Golden Gate Bridge photographs, though less explicitly striking than some of his work from Iran or North Africa, are perhaps the show’s most provocative. Of the first of the pair, “Golden Gate Bridge, California #1,” he writes, referring to the bridge itself: “It can be taken apart, piece by piece — with a camera.”

Isaacson the photographer seems unable to hold the critical writer within him at bay, having provided captions for nearly every image. These have a slightly overprotective feel, as though the experience that his photographs embody with such power — an experience of being unsettled and challenged by the visual world — were too exposing not to be capped by text. Indeed, Isaacson’s works communicate a kind of intimacy that comes only when one is willing to be shaken up. And so the notion that this Golden Gate Bridge photograph is a purely analytical act of dissecting the visual world, taking it “apart, piece by piece,” distracts from its real potency, which comes not from closure but from openness.

In “Golden Gate Bridge, California #2,” Isaacson presents a detail of one corner of this gargantuan miracle of engineering. His handling of the composition and color gives what is in fact a dense mass of metal and concrete the feeling of a flowing cascade. Layers of steel plates take on the look of one of Josef Albers’ famous “Homage to the Square” paintings, but this reference to modernism is rerouted by the presence of a pattern of rivets that give the feeling of a yet-unbroken Braille code. This orchestra of orange textures is lit on fire by its backdrop of glowing blue San Francisco sky.

Isaacson has an almost alchemical ability to turn the densest masses into the most ethereal surfaces. What exists in reality as a gravity-defying architectural feat is here given an entirely different orientation. No longer are we dealing with a center of gravity, but with an uncentered celerity, a lightness and a speed of movement that takes its grace from our certainty that metal and stone shouldn’t be able to become so animated — and yet, all the same, here is the Golden Gate Bridge taking flight before our eyes, and taking us along with it.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.