FALLEN PARADISE (New Orleans 1995 — 2005) — William Greiner

May 1 — June 27

This is the underbelly of pre-Katrina New Orleans. Greiner presents an image of a city that was already devastated, by neglect and abandonment, long before natural disaster struck. His imaging of New Orleans' urban vernacular is perceptively pictured through a carefully constructed use of color, form and content.

William Greiner's modus operandi is the American Color Tradition — the snapshot that isn't. Here, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. The seemingly objective actuality of the city, its banality, its ordinary everyday impression, is transformed into a vista of flush saturated palettes of color. Born, raised and (until Katrina) living and working in the city, New Orleans has always been an importnt source of inspiration for Greiner's work.

Here, a decade of looking and picturing his immediate environment, is brought together and displayed for the first time. Fallen Paradise is a celebration of apparent incidental imagery that is, of course, abound in formal devices — frame, vantage point, shape and line. Although there exists an autobiographical subtext, Greiner is most successful in compelling us to also look, not just at his city, but at the photograph itself. Whilst the importance of his subject does not disappear, these images function as photographic artifact — at once, they are observation and cultural object.

William Geiner lives and works in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

SUSPENDED REALITIES — Sarah Lynch

March 6 — April 25

Sarah Lynch's studio-based images present a photographic style that is both seamless and elegant. The tranquility of her aesthetic, in which she presents a tableaux of simple objects in front of a distant horizon line, is counteracted by the tension inherent in the miniature sculptures which she constructs for the camera.

Lynch presents encounters between inanimate objects, in which there appears to be epic struggles of balance and containment. Her remarkable ability to focus upon the details of a raspberry, a grape or a plum and transform them to a monumental scale, is a testimony to the imaginative qualities of the photographic medium. The specificity of scale is enhanced by an evocative reference to landscape. The use of a soft focus between table-top and backdrop, together with a palette of neutral gray tones, elicits an anonymous, empty and potentially vast space. This in turn is pierced by accents of luscious color and a sense of humor, performed by the objects as if on a stage.

SNOWBOUND — Lisa M Robinson

January 3 — February 29

For the past five years, Lisa M Robinson has been making photographs in the snow and ice. She is interested in metaphor, and has sought to comprehend our human place in this world.

On the surface, these images are quite beautiful. They appear elegantly simple and accessible, evoking, perhaps, the silent tranquility that one might feel after a fresh snowfall. Beneath the surface, however, there is a subtle tension. Like fine haiku, each image quietly references another season, a time of life or activity that has already passed, and may come again.

Throughout the series run the leitmotifs of poles and ropes and a palette of man-made color. The relationship between the human and the natural world becomes more tightly intertwined as the series progresses, and the cycles of life and death and transformation fold inward.

This interest in time passage and life cycles becomes distilled in explorations of water itself. Ice, snow, fog and water embody the liminal states of a primary element. At times, the multiple forms exist simultaneously. It is as though the thing itself possesses its own counterpoint — and transformation is a constant condition, despite seeming moments of stillness.

MOTHERLAND — Simon Roberts

October 24 — December 23

In July 2004, Simon Roberts began a year’s journey across Russia. Starting in the Russian Far East he travelled through the Siberian provinces, up the Kola peninsula and across to Kaliningrad, before heading down to the Northern Caucasus, the Altai Mountains and along the Volga River. He covered over 75,000 kilometres, making pictures in over 200 locations and creating one of the most extensive, comprehensive photographic accounts of this vast country by a Westerner.

Motherland is meant as a visual statement about contemporary Russia, fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The photographs are an attempt to counter some of the photographic representations of Russia that focus on collapse and deterioration – with their emphasis on the consequences of Russia’s turbulent past as opposed to the possibilities of its future – without sidestepping the realities of Russian daily life.

In this series, intimate and revealing portraits of contemporary Russians show us a diverse people, united by a sense of common identity and connected by a shared love of  'the Motherland', while breathtaking landscapes reveal the complexity and uniqueness of the country.