Frank Day in the WaPo

Photographer Frank Day got a nice little write up from Paul Richard in yesterday's Washington Post.

Landscape Photography's Altered State

Many landscape painters (like most cosmetic surgeons and makers of silk flowers) do their best to make their artifice look natural. In this jungly photo-painting called "Koreshan 39" (2008), Washington's Frank Hallam Day flips that ancient striving. While his picture is a photograph (shot after dark in Florida with a 13-megapixel tripod-mounted camera), it's a color painting, too. The exposure took 30 seconds. During that half-minute, the artist set a pair of flashlight beams, one yellowish, one bluish, playing on the fronds and vines, altering the spirit and the colors of the night.

We're at the Koreshan State Historical Site. The violet of the sky is from the light glow of Fort Myers. The night is still, though, if you look closely, you can see a breath of air. And that the stars have moved. Don't get me wrong. I like the natural world just fine -- to go kayaking in -- but as a subject of art, it's lost its relevance. Bringing artifice to the forest makes it far more interesting than the real thing. The light beams from the flashlights -- I held one in either hand -- make everything look twisted, tweaked. It's a subversion of the idea, and the ideal, of the wild. Which has been unsubverted for much too long.

Koreshan 39 is on view in "Nocturnal," Day's exhibition at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. It runs through Oct. 11.