"Elements of Photography"

In 1964, Joseph Jachna photographed Wisconsin’s Wolf River using a shutter speed so slow that it smooths the water’s peaks and valleys into an abstract mass of silken strands. Jachna’s gelatin silver print is one of the best works in a show devoted to light, water and their interaction in photography.

Given this broad mandate and a compact exhibition space, we’re surprised curatorial assistant Michael Green doesn’t offer a more eclectic sampler of the MCA’s photography collection. Local artist Adam Ekberg is represented by two works: Aberration #8 (2006), an ink-jet print that captures the sun through a grove of trees, ringed by concentric rainbows, and the video Disco Ball in the Woods (2006), a static, nocturnal depiction of the title subject. Ekberg’s pieces evoke Olafur Eliasson’s ongoing MCA show “Take Your Time,” the catalyst for “Elements of Photography”—and, like some of Eliasson’s work, the pair are formally compelling but not particularly deep.

Luisa Lambri finds infinite complexity, however, in a corner of the late architect Luis Barragán’s house in Mexico City. Her two untitled 2005 photos depict the same room with a slight variation in the window shutters. Lambri reveals the almost painful whiteness pervading these images—from the interior’s rough walls to the sunlight shining through the window—as a subtle spectrum of shadow.

Green bookends the exhibition chronologically with Nathan Lerner’s Untitled (Marks of Light) (1939) and Walead Beshty’s Four-Sided Picture (Red/Green/Blue/Yellow), December 31, 2006, Valencia, CA (2007). Made without cameras, these viscerally rewarding explorations of the show’s theme make us wonder why “Elements” largely ignores the decades between them.

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