Exhibit review: Photographers Alison Shaw and Dick Washburne at Sun to Moon Gallery

by Teresa Gubbins

The first thing you notice about New Views: Alison Shaw and Dick Washburne, an exhibit of photographs that opened on Saturday at Sun to Moon Gallery, is the color -- so brilliantly saturated, it feels lurid.

Next you note the artistry. These photos have a painterly quality that's breathtaking. You scrutinize them up close, not quite believing they're photos.

When putting this exhibit together, gallery owners Marilyn and Scot Miller specifically sought out Shaw's and Washburne's most colorful works, and the color theme is useful since it helps unify the viewing experience. Otherwise, the two collections come from pretty different places as far as subject matter and approach.

Shaw is a long-time fine art photographer and teacher from New England who specializes in seascapes. But none of those here. She's created a series of photos that were shot inside painters' studios. The subject matter consists of carefully conceived closeups of spattered paint-brushes, cans of paint, artists' palettes, and the like. Aside from their fine composition, these photos also represent a neat "meta" intellectual exercise, since they are making art of the tools used to make art.

The other distinctive element is Shaw's unique printing technique: She prints the images onto high-end William Turner paper that has a texture to the surface and gives them careful white borders. They end up looking exactly like paintings.

This is Washburne's first show, although he's a familiar name in Dallas as part of the group that owns Mi Cocina. But he's also built a name for himself as a photographer with bylines in D Magazine, particularly travel stories. (I contribute to D as well, although I don't know Washburne other than having met him at a couple of food events; but I was interested in his work and in the Sun to Moon Gallery, which moved earlier this year to the Design District.) Some of those travel destinations surface here, such as Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Moscow, including a stunningly detailed photo of Red Square that makes it look like a gingerbread village.

His photos are urban, brash, and resolutely contemporary, incorporating signs and typography and the movement of modern life. That could anything from be two lovers kissing while a train whooshes by to a street vendor sneaking a stealthy hit from a liquor bottle. Nearly every photo seems to have some kind of story, though the story-lines aren't always instantly apparent; trying to unlock them is what keeps you gazing at the photos.

He's a sucker for diagonal lines that draw the eye in, and says he often waits 30 minutes, unobtrusively, to capture a moment. Gallery owner Marilyn Miller calls him "a really amazing street shooter" in the same realm as Joel Meyerowitz, with whom Washburne studied. He also took a class with Shaw, which is how they met.

For Sun to Moon, the show is a departure from its usual specialty of Western landscape photographers and into material that's more topical and human. Humans are good.

The exhibit runs until November 21.