Submitted by Jean Dykstra on Fri, 07/22/2011 - 9:03am
The six large-scale photographs in Lydia Anne McCarthy's small show at Daniel Cooney through July 27 are spectral, dreamlike portraits of beautiful young men and women who seem caught in their own reveries. McCarthy took the photographs with an 8x10 view camera she made herself, replacing the lens with a magnifying lens called a Fresnel, which distorts, refracts, and softens the light. The colors bleed into each other, the edges blur, resolving vaguely into a face. McCarthy has written that she chose her subjects – all strangers to her -- based on certain qualities that she imagined they possessed. What those qualities are, we have no way of knowing (the photographs are titled with the subjects' names), so we are free to project our own ideas, be they romantic, erotic or otherwise, onto her subjects. The soft focus of the images, the faraway looks of the subjects, and the representation of an imagined ideal, McCarthy's photographs bring to mind a contemporary Julia Margaret Cameron. Or a memory you can't quite bring into focus, the faint impression of a dream as you surface into wakefulness.
