Photography exhibits frequently are baffling. Why are these photographs considered art, when they don't seem any better, any artier, than many ordinary snapshots, other than the show photos are bigger.
"Four Colorado Masters of Photography" an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum through Sept. 10, leaves no question why these photographers and their work deserve to be shown in a museum.
This retrospective show is an exhilarating glimpse of the magic that can be wrought by camera, film, and a master's eye, and how differently each master views the human scene. A good photograph sharpens our eyes, makes us aware of our surroundings, and looks at things with a different focus.
They make us smile - and stop our hearts with pathos.
And much as we love color, and are accustomed to it, black and white photographs pack a lot of punch.
Featured are Ferenc Berko, 1916-2000, who lived in Aspen; Hal Gould, born 1920, of Denver; Mary Alice Johnston, born 1921, Crestone; and Myron Wood, 1921-1999, of Colorado Springs. The diversity of their backgrounds and life experiences makes for a fascinating, if small, exhibit.
Berko was born in Hungary, raised in Berlin and went to photography school in England. He worked in India from 1938-47 for a movie company while also taking portraits, before moving to Chicago to learn more about his consuming interest, color photography.
There he met Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke, chairman of Container Corp. of America, who shared a vision of Aspen as a rare center for culture, intellect and physical growth. Paepcke offered him a job in Aspen, but Berko returned to India for a year, before moving to Aspen in 1949.
Berko's pictures include a few color photographs, of which he was a pioneer. One has a mass of green umbrellas making a mosaic; another a sweep of charcoal steps leading to a green and pink-paved plaza. Other photos capture a moment in the various cultures in which he lived: Three priests make a black punctuation mark against a lavishly-patterned garden; a woman anchoring her gartered-stocking is given a second look by a passerby; in India, dentures the size of tires are stacked outside a shop. My favorite is a dreamy scene of three fishing boats reflected in a misty waterscape, with land a faint blur behind, from Mexico.
Hal Gould has probably done more than any other single individual to make Coloradans aware of the fine art quality of photography, both through his own work and his Denver gallery, Camera Obscura, just behind the Denver Art Museum.
He also trained in Chicago, at the Art Institute, in the late 1930s, was inspired by other camera artists and as a freelance photo-journalist traveled widely in this country and abroad. He certainly has a canny eye for the unusual, but also has experimented with a wide range of techniques and believes darkroom efforts shape the photograph.
Gould's virtuosity is evident in the wide range of his pictures: a photographer's window in the USSR, with a life-size mannequin by an old wooden box camera; a bristle cone pine gnarled from centuries of battling nature, yet massive and strong; a mass of penguins on
a mound of rocks - a favorite with the youngsters who walked through the gallery; a curved beach with boats and fishermen, and sea gulls overhead, from China.
Sharper in focus, a colonnade of fluted columns and ornate iron lamps at night, and in the distance, a man lighting a woman's cigarette - a scene straight from the movies.
Mary Alice Johnston was in Paris from 1950 to 1958, as that fabled city regained its joie de vivre after the terrors of World War II. Her photographs keep that era eternally alive with a judicious lens.
There are Parisian street scenes; a snow-dusted quay and empty boats that make you cold to your bones; a naked baby asleep on a rock-strewn sandy beach; youngsters playing cards on a curb - all captured in a moment for us to imagine almost half a century later.
Wood's territory is more that with which we are familiar, the Southwest, the land of Native Americans, Spanish influence, adobe buildings.
He's a master of light, in an incredible scene at a Penitentes, and an all-white and shadows corner in a hall that becomes compelling, but he also gives importance to the little things - a row of books, a close-up of a music box's perforated metal disks, a painter's table with gear spread across it.
Give yourself time to wander through the contemporary show that precedes the photography exhibition. This is a rotation from the museum's regular collection, and is an easy and pleasant way to sample some of the museum's riches that don't always see the light of day.
There are a half-dozen paintings, large and small, by Robert Motherwell. These are interesting and abstract pieces.
An awesome bronze piece by Jim Dine called "Wheat Fields" has two large tires joined by a toothless hay rake, and on it a 4-foot-tall skull, and placed along the axle, pickax, shovel, red oars, rake, a parrot figure, lion, headless saint and other assorted memorabilia. It stops you in your tracks even if you don't understand it.