Lina Bertucci
at Schneider, through October 26
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Bertucci, who was born in Milwaukee in 1959, dates her interest in the placement of figures in space to a job she had while in college: she and an aunt were the first women brakemen on the Milwaukee Road railway line. Bertucci began to take pictures at work, partly because she wanted to document the railroad and industrial milieu that was starting to disappear, and partly because the men there were harassing her: “I felt that the camera allowed me to maintain my identity–it was one way of giving myself some kind of power.”
In Untitled (The Searcher), shot in southern California, the landscape seems incomprehensibly vast. A lone woman on a plain appears to be bending over slightly, once again facing a hill denuded, probably by clear-cutting. Bertucci found the woman digging around in a desert 85 miles northeast of LA and asked her to pose; later Bertucci replaced the original sky with another. The composition has none of the well-ordered feeling of a conventional landscape photo; instead the various textures of plain and hill and the way the plain rises to the hill seem to overwhelm the composition’s borders.
Though property owners have long objected to this old, unused structure, Sternfeld told Gopnik, “I just pray that, if they save the High Line, they’ll save some of the virgin parts, so that people can have this kind of hallucinatory experience of nature in the city.” The landscape presented in Ken Robson’s Christmas Tree is certainly hallucinatory. In the background, one floor of a loft building is brightly illuminated and seems to house one of the many art galleries that have flocked to the area in recent years. Such clean, white, airy spaces contrast even more dramatically with the wildness of the tracks, Sternfeld seems to gently suggest, than industry did. One of two trees in the foreground is bare, but the smaller of them, only a foot or two high, is an evergreen hung with Christmas lights.
