The Oregonian
Macho Romance

The inspiration for Washington photographer Christopher Harris' new show at PDX Gallery is another lensman (and Oregon resident), the esteemed Robert Adams. Adams is one of the most admired and emulated photographers of the last 30 years, one of the New Topographic photographers from the late '60s and early '70s who included Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and Henry Wessel Jr., among others. In cool, unlabored and unadorned black and white photographs of the Western landscape, Adams documented the urbanization of the natural environment. It was beautiful photography that also functioned as a form of anthropology.

Harris has taken photographs of the Western landscape, too -- mostly Eastern Washington. But instead of black and white, he uses color film. And instead of a standard camera lens, he uses a tiny pinhole camera that he made. The extended exposure time produces blurry, foggy abstract pictures, representations of the landscape as if seen through a window covered with morning condensation or partially concealed by drifting fog. Canola fields and open roads are transformed into washes of color that swell gradually into other shades. An early morning photo of a road, for example, becomes a modified zip stripe painting by the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman -- layered fields of orange and red and floating white light are separated by what looks like a central horizon line.

The power of Adams' photographs was that they offered beauty -- "the poetry of depredation," as one critic called it -- and a sociopolitical point of view that penetrated beneath the surface and into the heart of the land, so to speak.

But it's rather ambiguous -- as fuzzy as these pictures of fields and roads -- how thoroughly Harris documents the land and extends Adams' conceits, if that is his intention by invoking the work of the famous photographer.

Harris has certainly abstracted and poeticized the land that he's photographed. But Adams not only glimpsed beauty with his pictures, he also reflected back to the viewer the history of the land and the history of landscape photography.

Beautiful and seductive as they are, Harris has more simply made a series of photographic dreams.