Review of Exhibition: "Looking Through the Glass"
A Visual Banquet at Durham Art Guild by Blue Greenberg Tama Hochbaum's photographs are essays about feelings as much as they are about reality. Her exhibit gives us an overview of the diversity she brings to the art of photography. She experiments with movement in a static two dimensional photograph and then turns that idea 90 degrees by reworking other photographs into video; she also offers small handmade books with her photographic images printed on the pages. Her photographs are records of what she sees, but here she has filtered them through the glass of a particular vehicle, whether a car, a train or an airplane. Her largest piece includes 16 digital prints arranged in a grid. They are blurred images seen from a moving vehicle, with a semblance of some object, the headlights of oncoming cars, it seems, reduced to a white streak. Photographs are usually replicas of what we see, but in this assemblage they become images of a fleeting moment and so record feelings, not facts. Hochbaum pushes the medium toward something it cannot replicate, time rather than space, yet the series seen individually and together creates the illusion of movement. Using a different format, Hochbaum offers two composite photographs of lower Manhattan as seen from the sky. Under one, she adds a strip of images that we might see from a plane; in another she adds a strip of sites and scenes seen from a train. Her work invites careful scrutiny. There is much to see and much to think about.