August 1, 1999
"To Cuba and Back with framed reflections. Photographs by Maria Lau"
Star Ledger. Mitchell Seidell
One of the three artists being showcased at the Jersey City Museum’s current slide registry show is local resident Maria Lau, who is showing a dozen photographs of various mediums taken during a recent trip to Cuba. They do not so much showcase the island nation as Lau’s ability.
The works encompass four areas: color infrared, black and white infrared, black and white and color.
“Man and Water,” is an impressionistic black-and-white image, features a lone figure wading into the surf along a calm shoreline. The person is silhouetted against the glistening water, walking towards darkness at the right side of the scene. While most of the water is depicted, thanks to infrared film, as a hazy white, the sand along the coastline is a dark gray. The photograph is helped by the surreal nature of infrared photography. It alters our perception of reality so much that not even the artist can predict what the scene will look like until the film is developed.
“Bicicleta” also maintains that dreamlike quality. In it, a young man and child pose astride a bicycle. The man holds something in his hands, but you are not really sure what it is. The nature of the medium has rendered the fine details of the scene inconsequential. You have to concentrate on the more obvious things-the faces, the lines of the bicycle frame, the clapboard structures on the background. Like a fleeting image from a dream, you are not sure what you’re looking at, and have only a vague idea of what is happening.
“Oldsmobile,” a color infrared shot, could very well be a frame from a 1950’s home movie. The car, and nearly everything else save the vegetation, are rendered in various shades of blue. The bushes and trees show up, again thanks to infrared film, in magenta. The image is slightly blurred, like a frame from a hand-held movie camera. The shadows are dark and severe, hiding the vehicle’s occupants from view. The color shifts are reminiscent of what happens to movie and slide film from the 1950’s as it ages.
In “Flower Girl,” the infrared color shift if less pronounced, with only telltale patches of magenta grass and trees to give the viewer a hint of the film being used. It is used effectively, standing out distinctly from the blue-tinted scene of a girl in a white dress taking a panoramic view of Havana.
An untitled color print looks through the side window of one of those old jalopies to the far side of the car, where a little girl looks back at the photographer and waves toward the camera. She is framed by he shadowy interior of the car, as well as by the 45-year-old window’s streamlined design, the top curving downward from right to left. One fault is that the print carries a 2-inch border of white at both the top and bottom to accommodate the full 35-mm frame. This only serves to sabotage the artist’s obvious intent to use the car window as a frame for the scene.
In “Ceda El Paso” a woman appears to be waiting for a ride next to the weathered road sign that gives the work its name. She shields herself from the sun with the black umbrella held in her left hand. The shade also affords her a fair degree of protection from the camera. Details of her face are uncertain, helped partly by the color of her dark-brown skin. What catches your eye are the shapes created by the horizontal crescent of the black umbrella and the vertical triangle of the red and yellow road sign it almost seems to be touching.
“Man in Door” is a straight color work that gives you a slice of Cuban life. A man leans out the window in a wooden door, his bare torso standing out from the shadows. The building, as well as the door that frames the man, seem worn by age and sunlight to the extreme,as if the last time someone decided it was time for a spruce-up was 1959.
With “Santera,” Lau goes more toward portraiture, but one senses the subject wasn’t posing strictly for the photographer, if she was posing at all. The black-and-white work features the profile of a woman who takes a long, intense draw on a cigar as she looks off to the right side of the frame. Her skin and the cigar are almost black, in contrast to her dress and the fan with which sh cools herself, which are almost ethereally white...
August 1, 1999
"To Cuba and Back with framed reflections. Photographs by Maria Lau"
Star Ledger. Mitchell Seidell
One of the three artists being showcased at the Jersey City Museum’s current slide registry show is local resident Maria Lau, who is showing a dozen photographs of various mediums taken during a recent trip to Cuba. They do not so much showcase the island nation as Lau’s ability.
The works encompass four areas: color infrared, black and white infrared, black and white and color.
“Man and Water,” is an impressionistic black-and-white image, features a lone figure wading into the surf along a calm shoreline. The person is silhouetted against the glistening water, walking towards darkness at the right side of the scene. While most of the water is depicted, thanks to infrared film, as a hazy white, the sand along the coastline is a dark gray. The photograph is helped by the surreal nature of infrared photography. It alters our perception of reality so much that not even the artist can predict what the scene will look like until the film is developed.
“Bicicleta” also maintains that dreamlike quality. In it, a young man and child pose astride a bicycle. The man holds something in his hands, but you are not really sure what it is. The nature of the medium has rendered the fine details of the scene inconsequential. You have to concentrate on the more obvious things-the faces, the lines of the bicycle frame, the clapboard structures on the background. Like a fleeting image from a dream, you are not sure what you’re looking at, and have only a vague idea of what is happening.
“Oldsmobile,” a color infrared shot, could very well be a frame from a 1950’s home movie. The car, and nearly everything else save the vegetation, are rendered in various shades of blue. The bushes and trees show up, again thanks to infrared film, in magenta. The image is slightly blurred, like a frame from a hand-held movie camera. The shadows are dark and severe, hiding the vehicle’s occupants from view. The color shifts are reminiscent of what happens to movie and slide film from the 1950’s as it ages.
In “Flower Girl,” the infrared color shift if less pronounced, with only telltale patches of magenta grass and trees to give the viewer a hint of the film being used. It is used effectively, standing out distinctly from the blue-tinted scene of a girl in a white dress taking a panoramic view of Havana.
An untitled color print looks through the side window of one of those old jalopies to the far side of the car, where a little girl looks back at the photographer and waves toward the camera. She is framed by he shadowy interior of the car, as well as by the 45-year-old window’s streamlined design, the top curving downward from right to left. One fault is that the print carries a 2-inch border of white at both the top and bottom to accommodate the full 35-mm frame. This only serves to sabotage the artist’s obvious intent to use the car window as a frame for the scene.
In “Ceda El Paso” a woman appears to be waiting for a ride next to the weathered road sign that gives the work its name. She shields herself from the sun with the black umbrella held in her left hand. The shade also affords her a fair degree of protection from the camera. Details of her face are uncertain, helped partly by the color of her dark-brown skin. What catches your eye are the shapes created by the horizontal crescent of the black umbrella and the vertical triangle of the red and yellow road sign it almost seems to be touching.
“Man in Door” is a straight color work that gives you a slice of Cuban life. A man leans out the window in a wooden door, his bare torso standing out from the shadows. The building, as well as the door that frames the man, seem worn by age and sunlight to the extreme,as if the last time someone decided it was time for a spruce-up was 1959.
With “Santera,” Lau goes more toward portraiture, but one senses the subject wasn’t posing strictly for the photographer, if she was posing at all. The black-and-white work features the profile of a woman who takes a long, intense draw on a cigar as she looks off to the right side of the frame. Her skin and the cigar are almost black, in contrast to her dress and the fan with which sh cools herself, which are almost ethereally white...