Review: Far-ranging approaches define juried photo exhibition

Bottom line: A heaping helping of wit and some unusual perspectives inform this large group exhibition.

The kind of gallery that can pass under the radar, the Atlanta Photography Group Gallery in the Tula Art Center is a bit of a trade secret.

Tucked away on the ground floor of Tula, below the higher-profile Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, APG is devoted to events and exhibits that promote and support contemporary photography.

The latest APG juried exhibition, “Mary Stanley Selects,” invited Atlanta art world insider, curator and collector Mary Stanley to choose works from 100 national submissions for the show. Stanley’s uniquely quirky vision certainly feeds into her choices for “Mary Stanley Selects” in works bristling with attitude, wit and a fair amount of mystery.

There are some real gems in the mix, including some laugh out loud pieces. Kate Parker's you-are-there perspective in "No One Ever Wins" is typical of the streak of rueful comedy that informs quite a few works. Parker's photo features a little girl wailing in what looks like agony, her face flushed crimson. In Parker's hilariously off-kilter perspective, the girl is glimpsed from within the glass vitrine of a "claw" amusement game filled with colorful stuffed animals just out of reach. Her defeat is palpable.

Other works make you long to know more, to slip into the alternative reality the image evokes, like you'd lose yourself in a good book. Johnathon Kelso's evocative rendition of a lost-in-time place features an Alabama church whose interior looks out of step with contemporary life. A young woman stands at the center of the image, singing. Her cotton dress, plain hair caught back in a ponytail and makeup-free face give her the look of a Depression-era subject shot by Dorothea Lange.

She is the opposite of the world-wise looking young woman in Meredith Howard's "Downtown Girl," in which a copiously tattooed hipster wearing the urban battle gear of earbuds and sunglasses is captured mid-commute, her stylishly punk attire an interesting contrast to the ladylike powder blue purse she wears on her shoulder.

One of the most evocative images in the show is Clay Jordan's color photograph of a white-haired woman in house slippers and a stained skirt staring out at her yard. By capturing his subject with her back to us, Jordan makes her universal, the elderly Nana or mother or aunt we all know, the one with the tidy yard, who still hangs her wash on a line to dry. In another equally compelling still life, Jordan shoots an old-fashioned brass door bell floating like a desert island, in a sea of fussy, floral wallpaper, a potent collision of suggestive noise and action and utter, eerie calm.

Mystery of a different sort informs a pair of moody photographs by Camilo Ramirez. In Ramirez's "Burnout," a jet-black car idles in a fog of clouds or exhaust, its red tail lights burning like beacons in the darkness. In "Arabian Horse and Trailer," the red reflectors on a horse trailer also arrest our attention, drawing the eye in, to the presence of a white horse, incandescent against the night sky.

There is a sense, in a group show as big as this one, with more than 50 works on view, that certain pieces hit the juror’s sweet spot: They are the beloved children that had to be included.

Other photographs feel more on hand to fulfill an understandable need to represent and educate about various approaches to photography. Those works feature abstraction, foreground technique and play with our expectations of what a photograph can do.

While there is a generous spirit at work here, I would have preferred fewer, more judiciously selected images. There is some filler here that tends to dilute the impact of the better work.