“Shadows and Reflections” by Craig Blankenhorn
The SPACE Art Gallery
749 S. 8th St.
Philadelphia
Oct. 17, 2024
The silhouette of a cigarette-smoking man caught my eye — after Craig Blankenhorn’s camera captured his shadow.
I felt like I was wandering through a noir film set when I last visited The SPACE Art Gallery, where Blankenhorn — a veteran still photographer who’s worked on superlatively iconic television shows like the Sex and The City, The Sopranos, and Succession — is displaying his personal artwork for the first time in a solo exhibit titled “Shadows and Reflections.”
The show is a lesson on how to channel drama through one-dimensional design. Blankenhorn plays up the print medium by recognizing that its inherent limitations are part of the fun.
A backwards-capped boy, a skateboarder mid-jump, and an iPhone addicted girl are all as cool and captivating as the classic image of a cigarette smoker when the subjects are seen exclusively through shadows cast on monochromatic surfaces. Each individual is pictured in a different color — a bold red, neon yellow, or cobalt blue — that arrests our attention without telling us the whole, or even the true, story. Our imagination is inspired to fill in the blanks. (By the way, is “Blankenhorn” this guy’s chosen name?)
In other words, the artist is able to draw our attention to the mysteries belying life’s most mundane moments by withholding information from the viewer. Unable to see the faces of those profiled, I found my curiosity piqued. I then had the interest to examine and extract whatever information Blankenhorn preserved through his photos, like the visceral loneliness of a graffiti-sprayed wall likely overlooked by the shadow walking past it on her phone.
His landscapes follow the same formula: The energy of a rainy day in New York City, for example, is captured by superimposing the texture of a reflective, rippling water source over an image of a passing train. Red and orange lights mingling with the blue of the body of water attract us to the scene, but the textures of the two backdrops ultimately tell the story. The plot matters less than the feeling; one glance at that photo collage, and I could easily access the melancholy that comes with witnessing bad weather through a public transit window. The photo was flat, but its effect was cinematic and action-packed.
The gallery’s artist statement says that Blankenhorn is “telling the stories of everyday people and exposing the drama in every scenery in a single shot.”
I skimmed Blankenhorn’s biography, which said the artist “spent his twenties working blue collar jobs in Alaska, Louisiana, and Oregon as a boat skipper, fisherman and an oil field roughneck, all while studying photography at the University of Oregon.” He also spent two years in the U.S. army and working as a military policeman in Europe.
But his career of grabbing stills to market and sell high-budget T.V. shows reminded me that Blankenhorn isn’t just observing life’s latent drama — he’s manufacturing it. Just like Sex and the City, Blankenhorn’s work is lacquering life in New York with glamorous polish. He’s been tasked with making sure that every picture is worth more than 1,000 words, and he edits the hell out of every image to make sure it sings.
Blankenhorn’s photographs may suggest underlying storylines, but they aren’t exposés. I hate to say it, but his style is not real journalism. My bureaucratic brain wonders whether it wouldn’t be better cataloged under “communications,” or even “advertising.”
NEXT:
“Shadows and Reflections” remains on display through Nov. 4th. Check out The SPACE Art Gallery’s hours on their website here and follow Craig Blankenhorn’s on Instagram here.
