Vision thing

Vern McClish embraces the fine art of technology

by Leon Nigrosh

VERN MCCLISH: A JOURNEY WITH PHOTOGRAPHY, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF SEEING
At the ARTSWorcester Gallery at Quinsigamond Community College, 670 West Boylston Street, Worcester, through September 1.

The debate over photography continues to rise almost daily. Those in the silver-halide film camp declare their techniques still produce sharper, better-defined images for fine art than even the best digital equipment available. The digital people claim their equipment can copy and transmit images worldwide faster than any filmed materials could hope to. The film folks contend the information stored on a single 35mm slide would take up more than a gigabyte of space on a hard drive. And the digital acolytes counter by saying their way is "greener" with virtually no hazardous waste generated.

Enter the fray Vern McClish, who has one foot firmly planted in each approach. A dedicated film photographer since graduating with a BFA from Ohio University, McClish put aside his artistic goals when he joined Polaroid in 1978. But he never stopped taking pictures. Currently, he is showing 50 examples of his "creating with light" at the ARTSWorcester Gallery at Quinsigamond Community College, his first exhibition in more than 20 years. To prepare, he contrived a hybrid procedure using pictures taken with various types of silver halide film and then digitally retouching, altering, and enhancing them in a computer before reproducing them with pigmented inkjet inks on archival watercolor paper. The images on display are unique and, including several of his earliest photos, have never been seen before.

One example from a 1977 trip to Mexico is Bike and Dog. It is enlarged, reformatted, and printed with Quadtone grayscale inks on watercolor paper; McClish exerted greater creative control over the image tonalities with his computer. An adobe building provides a perfect frame for a speeding cyclist as he pedals past in a blur. Our attention is so concentrated on this well-defined portion of the image that only later do we notice a dog on the roof. This same printing method lends itself to the three stone heads McClish photographed at Mexico's Chapaltipec Park in 1999. By manipulating the images to heighten the black/white contrast and then printing them on nubbly cold-pressed watercolor paper, he adds to the mysterious stony quality of the ancient, weathered, carved rocks.

This film/digital technique allows McClish greater creativity and the ability to explore more graphic avenues in the production of his finished images. In Texas Homestead 1980, he took a normal silver halide image, colored it, and stretched it into a panoramic scene, creating an expanded view of the bleak Texas landscape and heightening the feeling of windblown desolation.

He still needs to use his perceptive eye to capture the precise moment on film, as in his examples from the "Rainy Day Woman" series shot in Prague in 1995. Starting with a strong statement on film of a lone woman wending her way through a rain-slicked cityscape, McClish used his computer to compose and reformulate the image, subtract unwanted portions, and alter the tonality until he had his desired result -- rather than settling for just what was in the negative.

In his series of floral images, McClish demonstrates the amazing colorizing capabilities available on the computer. By capitalizing on this technology and digitally enhancing the original filmed petal colors, altering -- and even removing -- some of the hues, he successfully transformed some standard flower photos into inviting, soft-edged, dreamy color patterns.

McClish hits his stride with selections from his still-in-progress "Dream Series." Several of the pictures are as simple as a pair of hazy hands floating in dappled space. Others are more complex, like Bedroom Dream, which is a colorful pastiche of images from other photos. His Far Away Dreams is a collage of images, colors, and visual textures all produced in the computer from bits and pieces pared from different photos and then "drawn" and "painted" over. A green moon floats in a circle of blue space while the figure of a pensive woman dissolves into (or rises from) a great fingerprint. The foreground is awash with modulating "brushstrokes" that give a sense of three-dimensionality to the work.

McClish does not foresee the demise of film photography, but he does think that as computers improve, fine-art photographers like himself will embrace digital technology as a means to develop greater emotional and artistic visions -- minus the biohazards.

The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Call (508) 854-4309.