Surrealistic and haunting, these are images of dreams. Shying away from the merely commercial, only objects touched by their owners, personal, a thumbprint of their individuality, have been selected by Carol Lubin-Reiss. She has tellingly matched the images of the lawn ornaments with the homes of the owners, the setting for their unique outdoor sculpture
garden of one.
Deliberately using a vintage plastic toy camera, the Diana F, made light proof by layers of tape, Carol Lubin-Reiss obtained the sharp central images and fuzzy darkened edges that give these photographs their mystical quality. There is a cost to this way of working. To use this camera, the light must be exactly right, the sun in the precisely correct position, the shadows must fall just so, the clouds must augment the mood. This kind of photography takes a measure of dogged persistence and the ability to hold an image, a concept in mind until the time is unerringly right to capture it.
In the photograph, “Route 36, Ohio” the hulking bear seems somehow both threatening and nonplussed by the house before it. How much waiting did it take to get the bear’s shadow, the line in the grass on the right, the lightness of the driveway to all converge on the distant house so that its visual weight balances the dark bear against the light sky? The eye of an artist may well note the importance of the background hills to the composition and the relationship of the negative space between the dark trees to the positive space of the bear’s back, but the photographer is trapped by reality. The hills are the shapes of the land, the trees physical objects. Unlike the painter, the photographer can not move them at will, nor eliminate or alter them, but is subject to the whims of nature. While it’s the eye of the artist discerning the potentialities, it takes the mind and heart of the artist to make them manifest.
Indeed, it takes an intuitive sense of composition and balance as well as a sense of humor. Examine the photograph “Fort William, Scotland”, the huge A shaped head of a disgruntled and bored lion guarding the similarly A shaped roofline home of the owner and its repeating A shaped dormer. With a thumb, block out the small tree and the white line of the distant house on the right and see how necessary they are to the picture. In the image “Beverly Hills, California” consider the humorous contrast between the stately vertical columns of the manor house and the sawhorse cows on the front lawn.
Although art is forever and the artist transient, there is a natural curiosity about a creator. Every artist, by their work, exposes themselves to the discerning viewer. They reveal themselves in what they have selected from the vast sea of sensory bombardment in which we daily swim, and by the tools they choose. It does not take much to reveal that Velasquez was an eye, but what an eye, Kathe Kollwitz a heart, but what a heart. Both Ansel Adams and Edward Weston manifest a love of nature, one is drawn to the big, the
great mountain and the deep valleys, the other to the small, the stones of
the beach, the tracery left by gentle waves.
Here too, these images tell much about the photographer. First they mingle curiosity and humanity; curiosity over why lawns are so decorated and humanity by a deep interest in the motives and needs for doing so. Although lawn decorations show no geographical boundaries, most are standard, only a fraction are treated or created by their owners.
As mentioned above, the technique itself requires both infinite patience along with a persistent image of the final art. The soft focus, the light leaks and the faded edges of the Diana camera become a scalpel in the hands of the discerning artist but is only a blunt instrument for most. Indeed, only an artist would attempt to create using a plastic toy camera produced by the now defunct “Great Wall Plastic Company,” of Hong Kong.
Given the attention to detail manifest in these photographs, it should not surprise the viewer to learn that Carol Lubin-Reiss is a woman of man accomplishments. She is not only a potent photographer with her equally talented husband, Peter, but also a recognized couturier, creating one-of-a-kind high fashions for select clients visiting her design studio.
Ulric Roldanus
