George Mattei’s “Little Girl on the Beach” is part of New Jersey Photography Forum’s “The Garden State” exhibition at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.
Most states don’t maintain their own mythology. But in New Jersey, our civic minds work differently. Even when we are grousing about where we live, New Jersey identity is a badge of honor. To live in Jersey is to be sensitive to the particularities of place. It is also to understand that the things inscribed in the landscape we inhabit are written into our souls.
But which landscape? For a small state, New Jersey is famously varied. Northern mountains, southern bays, eastern rail towns and western farmlands all have their own distinctive visual signatures. What unifies the plots in our Garden?
Surprisingly often, it comes down to our relationship to food. “New Jersey Photography Forum: The Garden State,” the 13-artist summer show that currently can be seen at The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, was funded in part by the New Jersey Council on the Arts. But it could have been sponsored by “Edible Jersey.” The photographers present New Jersey as a fecund place where plants grow fast, and thick, and hungry people can tuck in to the state’s larder with the confidence that there will always be more.
The exhibition reminds us that we tread daily on some of the best farmland in the hemisphere: first-rate soil that is a springboard for cultivation, watered by rivers and warmed by long summers.
“Pepper Seeds,” by Jerry Dalia.
The images of the countryside in “The Garden State” present the natural world in a constant state of renewal. It is not enough for Rockaway photographer Jerry Dalia to serve us a basketful of bell peppers in shades as vibrant as any in a box of fingerpaints. In his shot, he takes us inside the pepper and shows us hundreds of seeds, each one a promise of fruit to come. The “Pepper Seeds” are round and plump and aching to take root somewhere in the Garden.
That seed might tumble from a torn-open pepper onto the fertile earth revealed in Nancy Ori’s relaxed, idyllic shot of a farm in “Sussex County.” Thousands of sunflowers grow in rows that sweep, uninterrupted, toward the viewer in golden arcs. Though every flower looks healthy — every petal a rich, flawless, chick-feather yellow — they aren’t uniform, and they haven’t been arrayed with military precision. Instead, each droops and bends in its own particular manner. The flowers on Ori’s farm have been raised by horticulturists, but their caretakers haven’t had to obsess over them.
A red farmhouse in the distance floats atop the tide of golden blooms. These farmers are responsible overseers, but they aren’t domineering ones. On a landscape so lush, there is no need for anybody to sweat.
The “Garden State” ocean, too, feels imperturbable, infinitely refreshed, calm and reflective, and ready for the line to be cast. Paul Donohoe’s busy black-and-white photos of shorescapes lead with the buoyancy of commercial boats — powerful, unsinkable and industrial — on a sea ready to accommodate the enterprise of their sailors. The dramatic “Hold Fast Aft” is all iron and wood, spools, chains and ropes, a water-borne factory ready to capture and process the ocean’s abundance and convert it to food. Even the clouds in the sky scatter before its array of masts.
Yet a big boat it is not. Like Ori’s farm, it doesn’t need to be staffed by hundreds of hands to be profitable. The optimism of the shot is a testament to the hard work of Jersey fishermen, but also to the richness of the world beneath the waves. The rust and grease on the hull let us know that this vessel has been to sea many times, and surely will be back many more times.
Upon its return, it might bring its catch to the Wholesale Fish and Scallop Dealers, a low, flat dockside building that is the subject of Ken Curtis’ “Lobster House Dock.” Its sign reveals that it has been around for more than a century. It is practically eternal, engaged in an age-old activity, taming the deep on behalf of the gullets of hungry customers.
Paul Donohoe’s “The Boys.”
In Donohoe’s muscular “The Boys,” a pair of boats on either side of a long wooden pier dominate the frame, stretching their antennae to the top and dropping anchor at the bottom. The water, nearly as still as a mirror, is hardly a match for their might. This is a vision of a friendly sea: a submissive partner in the game of resource-gathering that, in a land of abundance like ours, is an easy one to win. So it goes in gardens, and all places that have attained a garden state.
Under gentle but ever-present human supervision, the natural world spills forth a bounty. Even the wild ocean is friendly. In George Mattei’s rosé-toned “Little Girl on the Beach” (see above), a child is up to her ankles in the surf, kicking at the gentle waves, one-upping Canute. The sea, child-proofed and cooperative, is her playground, and hers to command.
Our dominion over nature — and the sustenance it provides — extends inland. For better or worse, New Jersey has always been associated with roadside eating, and the promise that the calories we have extracted from the garden can be delivered to us somewhere on the highway. Ralph Greene’s series of diner photographs illustrates the near-mystical significance we have attached to automobile-age eateries. His reverential shots impart some of the gravity of sacred architecture to places best known for burgers and fries.
Ralph Greene’s “Retro Radiance.”
Some of his greasy-spoons resemble temples. Other diner pictures are reminiscent of giant jukeboxes, the grills of antique automobiles, and flying saucers from ’50s B movies. Many of New Jersey’s best known diners (including the famous Tick Tock, captured here in a reverential shot) were built in the “Googie” style associated with mid-century futurism, science fiction, and real-life space rockets. Fun was the name of the game, and Greene, whose shots are saturated with electric color, is sensitive to that intention.
But in his best images, like “Park West Diner,” he manages to suggest that there was something solemn hidden behind the pedal-mashing levity of the Googie movement. The soft glow of red neon on concrete steps and a honeycomb of curved glass lit from within makes the entrance to Park West as mysterious as a ziggurat.
What is missing in Greene’s work — and in “New Jersey Photography Forum: The Garden State” in general — are people. We are as densely settled as any place in the Western Hemisphere, but you would never know it from this sampling of Jerseyana.
There are no images here of the Newark skyline, or the row houses of Camden, or the Atlantic City Boardwalk in full midsummer swing. The best this exhibition can manage for an urbanist is an image of the Central Railroad Terminal in Jersey City’s Liberty State Park — a museum surrounded by green space — and Allan Wood’s ghostly shot of the “Nine Eleven Lights,” taken from very far away. Garden Staters who live in cities might walk away from The Visual Arts Center wondering if the state they saw is really the state they know.
Marv Kaminsky’s “Path Through the Cherry Blossoms.”
But if your understanding of the Garden State involves actual gardens, this amble through the agricultural regions of New Jersey provides plenty of rewards. Even in the deepest woods, evidence of human intervention is visible, and it is usually pretty graceful: bridges over country creeks, clearings in the thickets, trails under the boughs. Marv Kaminsky’s “Path Through the Cherry Blossom” is a ravishing little black and white image of a dirt road beneath a nimbus of flowering branches. The tones and textures in the print include charcoal-streak tree trunks, featherweight blooms in the foreground, and smeared streaks of light gray in the distance.
Just as beautiful is Skip Williams’ “Rahway River Park Pedestrian Bridge,” an ode to a public utility in a dense forest illuminated so fiercely by summer sun that the leaves of the trees appear as white as computer paper. In theory, it could have been snapped anywhere. Yet in its balance of the built and the grown, the manicured and the wild, the shrouded and the revealed, the industrial and the natural, it certainly seems like New Jersey.
It possesses that singular quality found everywhere in the Garden State, rural, suburban and urban: contradictions.
The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit will present “New Jersey Photography Forum: The Garden State” through Aug. 25. Visit artcenternj.org.
For more on New Jersey Photography Forum, visit njphotoforum.com.
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