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Nov. 22, 2013
Spurring imagination
Larry Wolfson sheds light on uncommon vistas.
OLGA LIVSHIN
Larry Wolfson has liked photography since he was a kid. “My friend in high school had a dark room,” he remembered. “I watched him working there and saw a picture emerge. It was amazing.”
After that first experience, creating his own pictures has become his beloved hobby, while he studied and worked as a teacher. He taught high school English and social studies, and was an instructor in the teacher education program at the University of British Columbia for a dozen years. Through his four decades of teaching, Wolfson never abandoned his camera and, in the last couple years, since his retirement, he has been able to dedicate himself completely to photography. His second solo exhibition, Story/Line, opened at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery on Nov. 14.
The pictures in the show span the globe. There are images from Vancouver and Tokyo, Iceland and Prague. “We traveled a lot during school vacations – my wife and I,” Wolfson told the Independent. “She was also a teacher and she has been the most important supporter of my photography. She suggested the name for this show. There are architectural lines in almost every frame, she said, and stories too.”
The images in the show contain very few people, but lines, shapes and light juxtapose in unusual combinations. “I’m always looking for the uncommon,” said Wolfson.
“I show all my pictures to my wife. If she says that an image could appear on a calendar – forget it.”
Every photo in the gallery has an embedded story. Sometimes those stories happened before the photo was taken, sometimes after, and sometimes those stories are just implied. Like transparent question marks in the backgrounds, they spur the viewers’ imagination and invite them to supply their own stories.
One of the pictures, “Simon Fraser University,” depicts a pool of dark water with a clamp of orangey leaves and a broken chair floating in it. How did the chair ended up in the pool? Why do the leaves sprout out of a planter that has sunk to the bottom of the pool and is hardly visible? The viewers are free to improvise, while they enjoy the sunlight playing in the murky depth of the water.
Another picture, taken in Nunavut, depicts a local fisherman throwing his net into the deep fissure in the ice. The ice is two-layered, and both layers encompass different colors and textures, despite both being white. Almost. Shades of white, really. “We taught in Nunavut,” said Wolfson. “Now we visit our friends there every few years. That picture was taken during our last visit.”
An entirely different picture from Nunavut, “Arctic Char,” reflects the feast after a successful fishing expedition. “The raw fish was lying on the floor,” Wolfson explained. “We all sat around, eating it. It’s quite tasty. I asked everyone to move away for a moment, so I could take pictures of the fish.” There is nothing conventionally beautiful about a bloody fish cut into pieces, but the story behind it was years in the making.
While the Nunavut photos are reminiscent of the region’s wild nature, the one from Prague is different. It’s a 20-year-old, black and white photograph of a Jewish cemetery. “I took exclusively black and white photos in those days. I only switched to colored digital photography in the last few years,” said Wolfson. “Lots of artistic photography is done in black and white, so you’re not distracted by colors.”
He recalled that trip to Prague vividly. “We rented an apartment above that cemetery. It’s one of the old ones, where the graves are layered. When one layer of graves was completed, the next one was arranged on top.” Because of several layers of soil, the cemetery surface is much higher than the street outside its stonewall. The passersby’s heads are almost level with the top graves.
“I took the photo from our window,” Wolfson said. “You see a group of people gathered outside the wall for a tour of the old cemetery and a group of graves inside, and all this layered memory between them.”
One of the most original pictures in the show is the photograph of an old hotel in Iceland. The hotel stands on a rounded corner, and all its windows reflect a different image. One shows a mountain, the next one a house across the street and, in all of them, the lamps inside the lobby multiply endlessly, like in a surreal painting.
The comparison with a painting is not accidental. Artistic photography is what Wolfson does, in his own subtle, minimalistic way. He doesn’t hold with the doomsayers’ prediction that photography as an art is dying because everyone now has a camera in his or her pocket. “There is always going to be a demand for good pictures,” he said. “It might be even more important now than before. Everyone can take pictures, yes. Everyone can talk, too, but not everyone can write great literature.”
Although Wolfson brings home photos from many places around the world, his photos from Vancouver are just as fascinating. He never takes his camera along the routine tourist trails. “When I go to take pictures, I have to be alone. Every walk is like an adventure, even when it’s a few blocks from home. I always find something new. That’s the thrill of photography.”
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
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