Reviews

William Farley - Atmospheric Worlds
By John K. Grande

Night photography has seized many photographers over the years, including none other than Brassai whose immortal book Paris by Night (1933) unveiled the life of that city and its incredible streets, architecture, and lighting with a raw textural and sophisticated social eye. Similarly, there is an admixture of that textural rawness, and something cinematic about the visuality as well as continuities that William Farley captures with his camera. These photographs are situational and challenging. It is as if the whole world had become a theatre set. There are color fades, shifts of light, and atmospheres that suggest transcendence; all this in the neighborhoods and places of in and around San Francisco. Since, so many interesting details seem to get lost in the shadows after dark, it is William Farley's keen eye and impeccable composition that brings them to light.

These photographs are descriptive and offer us real world environments at a time and place when the rest of the world is sleeping, or most of it is. Whether it may be a scene under the arches and structures of the Golden Gate Bridge (2012), or Truck on McKinnon (2012) that is as ancient looking as it is monumental for all its anonymity and silence, Farley uses lighting assiduously and animates his scenes by intertwining facets of the natural and artificial theatricality. By capturing these scenes when he does - at night - William Farley brings a new accent to these urban and industrial places with a touch of his cinematic style, or old new world nostalgia, there is something of that flourish found in Frank Brangwyn's paintings of the early industrial era.

Unlike Jeff Wall, whose postmodernist staged set ups have a prescriptive irony, William Farley's scenarios have an aura that captures the change and dynamics of change without falling prey to aesthetic typologies, or ideologies. Instead, what can only be called naturalism infuses these photographs with a character, a context, and a real world love of the presence of light and tonality.

With Portola Street West (2012), the unnatural illumination projects into the natural at night from a distance. Situations are reversed. In this case nature in the form of three mature trees that are highlighted by unnatural man-made street and building lighting that projects into these trees. Here we have landscapes where nature and the man-made intertwine in urban scenarios - unnatural nature. Skies, horizon lines, foreground and background project an idea of what a landscape is. Conservatory of Flowers (2013) is like a coloristic fogbound micro-set with a house and trees in front, highlighted by the beams from some anonymous car's headlights. The scene is a set up worthy of Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown. William Farley builds these auras using projection, with a full understanding of the mix of natural and the unnatural. We see this in Crane and Reflected Pilings (2008), Tree and Skyscraper (2010), and Laguna Honda Hospital (2011). The actual sites are unmediated non-spaces, places that exist as places of transience, where people travel through, but never identify with specifically.

William Farley catches this feeling of the ephemeral, the fleeting character of the co-mingling of built and natural environments, and does so by capturing them at their most vulnerable, unpeopled, and at night. What is most interesting with William Farley's most recent works is that he offers partial and paradoxical glimpses of a larger intuited world. The reach is from the post-industrial through to the spiritual. A few traces of the Beat Generation of photographers' streetwise sensibility are there too, of Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank, but the story William Farley is telling with his camera is of an atomized age, where individuals do not have that freedom to share mythologies, their personal narratives with each other, as their ancestors once did.

Each photograph tells a story visually, as if imagery itself were a container flattened by time and space, as if any potential connectivity were erased. That erasure sets up a pictorial density to each image that renders it a complete world unto itself. The dialogue between viewer and the image that William Farley works with is post-historical. The references are always contextual and historical. What nature is, or could signify remains a central part of his vision, and these spaces are not windows we look into, or out of, but the glimpses of a nomad whose landscapes merge the natural and the cultural, or man-made.

We are all nomads now, positioning our vision in relation to another's, situating our souls in relation to endless transformation, somewhat individual and solitary, even naive despite all the visual information we have. A touch of the poet, of William Wordsworth and of the romantics, and of Walt Whitman (the subject of one of William Farley's films was John O'Keefe's adaptation of Walt Whitman's Songs of Myself), even of the Hudson River school remains in William Farley's photographs. William Farley's photographs are atmospheric worlds, as much construct, as they are realities.

JOHN K. GRANDE has contributed his views on art to a variety of arts publications including Artforum, Sculpture (USA), Vie des Arts, British Journal of Photography, Vice Versa and Landscape Architecture.
Recent books, catalogues and shows include Art Nature Dialogues (SUNY Press, N.Y.), Dialogues in Diversity (Pari Press, Italy), Eco-Art (co-curated with Peter Selz at the Pori Art Museum, Finland, 2011).Kathy Venter - LIFE, Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto (2013), Mellifluence; Akash Choyal, Art Chill, Jaipur, India (2013), Thomas May- Nature Reflected, Museum Manggha, Krajow, Poland, Ichi Ikeda - 5 Greenscapes, Tokyo, Japan (2013). Art in Nature (Borim Press, Seoul, South Korea) won the national public prize in 2012. This autumn (2013) John K Grande's Interviews with Contemporary World Artists will be published this September by Quinyan Press in Shanghai, China.

 

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