Snake Eyes - Media - Book Review

John Gossage and Teni Weifenbach

Berlin, Washington D. C.: Loosestrife Editions, 2002

Collaboration takes the form of dialogue between two very different sensibilities in John Gossage and Terri Weifenbach's new book, Snake Eyes. Photographed in the idyllic Italian valley near the town of Lana, the piece displays acute self-consciousness about its historical precedents in format (travel albums, nature photography and documents of place) and aesthetics (modern to post, the observed quotidian and the extraordinarily beautiful, the record and the revelation). Any pretense of unity--revealing, for example, that both photographers were in the in the same places, at the same times-splits immediately into parallax view. ""

Differences abound. Weifenbach's luxurious color photographs are larger in format and voluptuous in their refulgent display, contrasting with the richly detailed, tightly focused, and monochrome works of Gossage. He focuses on the moment and the place, revealing a location through specific, recorded observations. Looking is a mediated act, photography a means to catch the privileged moment within the continuum of experience. All his acts of selectivity are premised on the conviction that a photograph shows something about the world in its particularity. Some things, Gossage suggests, are simply more interesting than others. Avoiding cliches, eschewing the obvious, and attending to the protocol of photographic formalism within a culturally sensitive awareness of location, Gossage reveals the here and now as a historical circumstance. His images offer frames from a passage through the Alpine valley, with its touches of old-world heritage and abundant natural beauty.

Weifenbach immerses the viewer, but not in a long shot of unified perspectival subjectivity. She submerges into a complex, multi-dimensional spatial engagement with the act of looking at the flora and foliage in this valley through images that suggest extended duration. Vividly colored, her work performs a seductive act in which pure beauty and its mortal pleasures are so immediately engaging that the details of reference frames, iconographic specificity and meaning can only come into focus in the aftermath of the initial engagement. History is a fantastic catalogue of possibilities for Weifenbach, drawing on suggestions of fairy tales, the mythic and the archaic realms. The glimpsed roof of a cottage in one photo bespeaks dark spells and possible enchantment, not an architectural heritage. Weifenbach embodies the suspension of belief, a glimpse of a world being revealed, a way of knowing unfolding as a sensual process. Nothing autobiographical or personal constrains her work in its uncompromising exploration.

In organizing the photographs into book form, Gossage takes the role of respondent, sizing and sequencing his images in a dialogue actively engaged with hers. The effect is almost linguistic. His resolved, nearly semiotic statements work as suggestive points of reference, shaping what might otherwise be individual, parallel works into a well-formed relationship. Not so much a document of experience as an exchange between two modes of visual, sensual intelligence, Snake Eyes makes full use of the structural features of a book format to inscribe these distinct points of view. Contrasts in scale and strategic placement within the layout heighten the chromatic offsets of color and black-and-white. The large size of the book about 14" x 18" closed, intensifies the immersive experience. Threaded through with consistent intensity, we sense the gendered relation of Weifenbach's knowledge and Gossage's interest in response--the interchange of artists replaying an archetypal scene of exchange, in a new Eden of intellig ent photographic intercourse.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group