Doug Prince at SNHU

Fact or Photo? Doug Prince at SNHU

By Elizabeth Marzloff
HippoPress.com
April 18, 2002

When you watch bombs being dropped on Afghanistan via a satellite feed broadcast on CNN, is it really happening? How can you be sure? In truth, a photograph is subject to all sorts of manipulations, which begin, we often forget, within the camera lens itself as light bends its way through filters and curved glass. Photographer Doug Prince, whose work is currently on display at the McIninch Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University, harnesses these distortions to create dream-like compositions.

Many of the works in the exhibit "Doug Prince: Explorations in Image Making" are black and white silver prints created by overlaying one image on top of the other during the printing process. The boundary between the two or three images is perfectly blended, creating seamless psychological dramas. The clues are in the temporal and spatial breaks that create a quiet dissonance. In the foreground of one, a boy sits in shallow water at the oceans edge, while behind him a whales tail slips beneath the surface. The tail is no larger than the boys head, and impossibly, breathtakingly, close.

The blended images seem organic, as though somehow that moment might have actually existed; yet they are suffused with the tension between the real and the fabricated. We want these images to be true, with their sensual swimmers emerging from enchanted pools of water and sand accumulating onto a beach in the middle of a carpet. They document fantasies that have just slipped the bounds of reality.

Also remarkable in the exhibit are Princes small photo-sculptures, three- by five-inch compositions created from layers of positive film transparencies sandwiched between layers of Plexiglas. Like the blended photos, the spatial distancing creates both a realistic sense of the room or scene portrayed, and at the same time breaks up that space into the individual layers of a dream state: each element of the unified scene is distinct and meaningful, inviting interpretation.

The exhibit encompasses a variety of photographic mediums, including the blended silver prints, photo-sculptures, photograms, photo-resist prints, digital prints, and compositions created using PageMaker software. Prince has been using darkroom techniques of layering, blending and masking since the 1970s. These same techniques form the backbone of nearly all image-making software programs. They maintain the distinct integrity of each layer, and allow the artist to manipulate the degrees of transparency and to blend and mask separate elements to create a digital print.

The connection is tantalizing, but Princes digital works dont push the medium in the same way that his darkroom-based works do. The blending and layering of images is inherent in PageMaker, the filters are pre-set and familiar to most. The use of cast shadows and scanned images of Renaissance art seems too easy for Prince, who has proven his ability to create meaningful and technically advanced works of art. These digital works are more than just a technical departure from the other pieces in the showwith a few exceptions, they lack the dissonance and psychological import.

On the other hand, the highlights of the show are the photo-resist silver prints "Body Print #8" and "Body Print #9" both from 1996. Prince applied a light-resistive substance to his body and then pressed his body onto photographic paper. When the paper is exposed to light, his naked imprint remains unexposed. Here is the sensuality, the layering of multiple prints, the distortion of something very real into an inviting image created through expert manipulation of the image-making process.

Many a photographic and cinematic movement has begun with the impulse to strip the image of all things that might interfere with the pursuit of realism. Doug Prince, an accomplished and renowned photographic artist, pushes his work in the opposite direction, seeking techniques that jar our understanding of space, time and scale. He plays with our easy assumption that photographs depict an objective reality, pulling us deeper into the fantasies he creates through its distortion.

"Doug Prince: Explorations in Image Making," through June 6 at the McIninch Gallery, Southern New Hampshire University, 2500 North River Road, 629-4622. Hours: Monday-Thursday and Saturday 10 a.m. 3 p.m., Thursday 5-8 p.m.