• Platform Gallery - Suzanne Opton
• Crumm-255 Days in Afghanistan, 40 by 50 inches

Sometimes simple images capture the most complex information. It's impossible to know, for instance, all that's going on inside the heads of the soldiers pictured by Suzanne Opton.

Tonight at the Henry Art Gallery, Opton will talk about why she took their pictures, and what the process was like for her and the soldiers. For the Soldier series, she framed them simply, isolating their heads, each one lain on its side. There's a double association; they appear to be daydreaming, sort of, but in context they also appear to have been shot down.

Opton had trouble getting access to soldiers; she was turned down by several bases before Fort Drum allowed her to come on and take pictures of the soldiers who'd just returned from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The titles of her portraits include their names and the length of their most recent tour: Williams-396 Days in Iraq or Pry-210 Days in Afghanistan. Pry has his eyes shut; he looks like he is grateful to be back. One says, Mickelson-Length of Service Undisclosed. Mickelson looks worried, like he's not going to getting comfortable in front of the camera, or maybe for a very long time.

Of course, the truth is that there is really no information at all in these photographs, or none that's conclusive in any way. You cannot compare one man's 210 days to another man's 255 days in Afghanistan by looking at their faces on film any more than you can really compare them at all, ever. Events have slipped into the folds of their memories; some will never come out again. And what is one day in combat compared to another?

But taken as a group, the series provides an impression of a moment—which is again only a construction: the moment between being over there, and being back here. Opton took the pictures on a view camera, the kind of contraption that seems to slow down time, which gave the soldiers the chance to get used to their position, to get out of and then back into their heads, to let their minds wander. The posed heads in the pictures look like screens where thoughts and feelings are in the midst of crossing, but with her choice of the shared time frame of her subjects, Opton is also capitalizing on the eventful here-nowness of a snapshot.

In 2008 and 2010, the Soldier photographs were seen as billboards in nine American cities. Now, they appear much closer to life size, at Platform Gallery in Seattle. The exhibition remains up at the Pioneer Square gallery through February 11. (Details are here of tonight's talk.)

Seattle artist Marie Gagnon (the viaduct painter soon moving to the East Coast, unfortch), also happens to work at the Pride Foundation, and she sent me a note this morning.

Yesterday I arrived with my coworkers at the Capitol in Olympia to witness the historic Senate vote on SB 6239 for marriage equality. It was a powerful experience and I hope to share more about it after I’m rested. (I've been working 12 plus hour days this week.)

But very late last night as soon as I uploaded my photos and saw this particular photo I immediately thought of one of my all time favorite paintings, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit by my art god, John Singer Sargent. I studied his use of whites quite a bit during my research fellowship in the late '90s.

In addition to the similar composition, I was powerfully struck by the idea behind the two pieces: Anticipation.

The painting has a sense of four young girls possibly unaware of their anticipation for their burgeoning maturity whereas my photo depicts a conscious anticipation for the evolving maturity of our society as we work to embrace greater justice for all people.

• Marie Gagnon

• John Singer Sargent

There's a new juried show at Gallery 110, Matthew Clifford Green's Excitable Boy at Lawrimore Project, Guy Tillim's contemporary photographs of Tahiti (just in time to compare them with Gauguin's paintings coming on view at SAM) at James Harris Gallery, June Sekiguchi's Within/Without installation after her residency in Laos at ArtXchange (with video!).

And this is your last chance to see San Francisco photographer Sean McFarland's transporting large-format photographs of dark forests, at Greg Kucera. Looking at them in the gallery, they exert a force field, pull you in...

• Greg Kucera Gallery

Dear whomever this may concern,

Tomorrow starts the first day of a full month of Erotica Art in LaConner, WA.

There will be a peaking point, February 24th...where thee Jezebel Rebels will be performing, also live music and an artist's reception. See attached

Please let me know if you have any questions at all~

Sincerely,

Lucy Mae

• Courtesy G. Gibson Gallery
• Bill Brandt, Northumbrian Miner At His Evening Meal, 1937, gelatin silver print, signed, 11 by 14 inches

This is one of those pictures that doesn't need any commentary. Just look at it.

It's part of an exhibition of classic 20th-century photography at G. Gibson Gallery through February 18.

What may need explaining about this photograph is not what you see, but just how collecting it would work. How many prints of it are out there? How does the print that's for sale in Pioneer Square relate to the one that hangs on the walls at the Museum of Modern Art?

Tomorrow at 2 pm at the gallery, Michelle Dunn Marsh will give a free talk on the fascinating business of collecting photography.

Dunn Marsh is a longtime editor of Aperture magazine who happens to be based in Seattle as well as New York, and she's also a collector herself, mainly of black-and-white 20th-century photography. (She is also a straight shooter and just an interesting woman.) To get a sense of her ideas about photography and collecting, check out the Q&A Peggy Roalf did with her here. For instance,

PR: The 2012 exhibition season has launched with the announcement of dozens of exhibitions of black-and-white photography, from coast to coast, from vintage mid-20th century prints to contemporary work. It’s inevitable that there would be a black-and-white backlash, but have you had any thoughts on why, right now?

MDM: I’m so glad you asked that. I think the industry decline of many aspects of traditional photography has brought the scarcity and preciousness of black-and-white to the forefront. The travails of brands like Kodak and Polaroid speak to the masses—but photographers have been grappling with these changes for some time.

I think that many collectors are now responding to the craft of the print, in our increasingly digital age. We’ve finally accepted the photograph as object again, not just an image. Where once darkroom work was perceived as mechanical compared to the artistry of painting, now the “wet” darkroom is seen as a place of alchemy, and digital printing is deemed, by many, as rote (but it is no easier to get a consistent digital print than it is to get a consistent darkroom print. Finesse is required in either process).

I find a richness and a depth that is seductive in a silver or platinum print. I take respite primarily in black-and-white images because I experience the world each day in color, so the graphic quality of a tonal range from light to dark, free of chroma and without a light source burning into my eyes, transports me. That said, I recently bought a William Christenberry print because his green warehouse is the exact shade of the barn I grew up with.

With the general state of the world feeling a bit fragile these days, I think that many people are turning away from the physically monumental to the wonder that can exist within an environment the eye can absorb in a glance, and then revisit slowly, over time.

• Stolen! Tribute to the Concussed Skier by Jud Turner, valued at $800.

This heist just cannot get any respect.

"This art heist unlikely to be made into a movie," was the headline in the Eugene Register-Guard. The works were for sale for only $1,400 combined. The headline on HuffPo: "Thieves Steal Art Valued At $1,400?!"

Here are pictures of the two pieces taken. The thieves went to the trouble to rappel down into the gallery through the skylight. From the HuffPo report:

"Tribute to the concussed skier" is over four feet in diameter while Williamson's "Horizons II" measures over four and a half feet. The thieves arguably could have taken smaller pieces with higher values, leading some to believe it was a matter of taste. "I have far more expensive pieces in the gallery," Jo Gallaugher said to the News Tribune. "The pieces they chose are the pieces that are most often admired by men in their 20s." (Ouch.)

The artist, Rivaelino, financed it himself, so the government couldn't say no to a huge system of roots—a sculptural installation all over the capital—growing up and around, snaking through, Mexico City.

Very cool video of the project here, and images and story by the Associated Press here.

• Courtesy the artists and Suyama Space
• Rick Araluce and Steve Peters created UPRISING, a system of pipes that appears to have sprung from within the walls and floor, with sounds traveling through them.

This installation looks like it has the potential to be psychologically haunting in that return-of-the-repressed-Louise-Bourgeois-spider kind of way, with an industrial twist. It's a perfect way to end a snowstorm.

Tonight's opening is from 5 to 7, and tomorrow, the artists will give a (free) talk in the gallery at noon.