Photographer Finds Symmetry in Gardens and Galaxies
Facing the entrance, an unmarked metal door, of Anonymous Gallery are two photographic prints by Todd Eberle , each big, brilliantly colored and symmetrical somewhere between a Rorschach image and the view inside a kaleidoscope.
One is a tangle of yolk-yellow parrot tulips with dark pink stripes, picked from Mr. Eberles garden in West Cornwall, Conn., and mirrored in such a way that the petals and stems create a complex pattern, evoking William Morris, the English designer, or something more primal: a beetle on its back; a woman, limbs akimbo.
The other is a picture of a galactic garden: a 2012 photograph beamed from the Hubble telescope that Mr. Eberle reworked flipping and distorting the image and adding color to produce a marbled burst of magenta, midnight blue and crimson that seems both to stretch from its dark center and suck the viewer in.
The prints are an opening statement for Cosmos (heavens/earth), Mr. Eberles solo show here that runs through Tuesday and comprises two series still lifes of flowers (earth) and images created from Hubble pictures (heavens). The works will also form part of a group show, Cornwall Bohemia, at James Barron Art in Cornwall, Conn., through Aug. 3.
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Mr. Eberle, a photographer at large for Vanity Fair, calls them imagination machines that evoke the mystery and polarities of nature: Chaos versus order, mortality and immortality, organic and cosmic, he said, speaking by telephone from Connecticut. He added, They are both memorials to time and life.
As you stand there, the thing that is in between these pictures is us, Mr. Eberle said.
Mr. Eberle has been making flower photos for several years and began working last year with images from HubbleSite.org . The telescope, which is celebrating its 25th year, orbits Earth and captures stunning, detailed images of the universe at different stages of its evolution.
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Joseph Ian Henrikson, founder of the Anonymous Gallery in Manhattan and its Mexico City counterpart, suggested putting them together. They speak to each other, he said of the unframed works, each of which measures 5 feet by 6 feet.
The series share the same process: Mr. Eberle digitally flips an image to create a picture whose quadrants mirror one another. He heightens the tone of the picture to produce luminous, even garish, colors. Daffodils, zinnias and tulips become so vivid they look artificial.
I make this almost abusive use of Lightroom and Photoshop, he said. Its highly manipulated.
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Mr. Eberle, whose work includes fashion, portraits, architecture and interiors, said it was refreshing to produce images with little sense of how they would turn out.
When I go to shoot something I usually know what I am going to get the lighting, the subject, he said. With the flowers, the final visual result is something that I cant anticipate.
For the flower pictures, Mr. Eberle plunders the garden carefully cultivated by his partner, Richard Pandiscio, at their modernist weekend home in West Cornwall.
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Mr. Eberle arranges them in a homemade studio in their living room in West Cornwall, using natural light from the patio. Often, he photographs flowers as they are dying: One image in the show is a delicate lattice of half-withered delphiniums, chives, dill and the skeletal remains of firecracker flowers. The use of symmetry allowed him to create quasi-abstract images that invite the mind to wander.
Alejandra Lpez-Yasky, 42, a Mexican painter who visited the show, said Mr. Eberle created these connections between beauty, sexuality, the cosmos.
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Other visitors saw faces, a map of the Caribbean, animals, chandeliers, said Mr. Henrikson and Laura Resndiz, his partner at Anonymous. In a smudge of green and pink in one star picture, Mr. Eberle sees a many-limbed Ganesh-like figure and, above it, the head of an elephant wearing earrings. The Hubble photographs, meanwhile, are transmitted in monochrome; Mr. Eberle injects them with powerful hues to create glowing, extravagant celebrations of the unimaginable.
They feel like depictions of some future world, but theyre actually the most distant relics visually that we have, he said of the images, which capture light that has traveled for millions of years. Its an archaeologic dig in space, in a very abstract way.
Mr. Eberle, 51, is fascinated by the future and by gadgets he drives a Tesla electric car and spoke briefly on his new Apple Watch. As a child he loved the 1960s science fiction show Lost in Space, and last year, as he worked on the heavens images, he watched the documentary series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium.
Mr. Tyson has talked of peoples feelings often of depression as they confront their infinitesimally small place in space and time. He said in an email that Mr. Eberles works, which he saw on a computer, dare viewers to interpret their own emotions their own psychological state as they gaze upon the true depths of heaven and earth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/arts/design/a-photographer-finds-symmetry-in-gardens-and-galaxies.html?_r=0
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I read the article several times - I still do not totally understand the process employed, but the photographs are magnificent.
A truly skilled photographer at work
The last time I saw images like that I was looking through a kaleidoscope. I cannot believe that word was not even mentioned in the article.
Buzz
I am glad that you liked them and appreciate the feedback
I thought of a kaleidoscope when I saw the pictures as well - w actually have one in the basement that belonged to our son