New Directions in Photography
Winston Wächter Fine Art
403 Dexter Ave N, 652-5855.
Through Aug 18.

Rene Pena
Suyama Space
2324 Second Ave, 256-0809.
Through Aug 24.

Art, like most things, is not immune to the winds of fashion, although such vicissitudes are called, loftily, "movements." The style-dictating 19th-century salons, the artists who worked in opposition to the salons, Pop Art, Op Art--you name it. Whether the market dictates taste or taste dictates the market is known only to the Sphinx; at any rate, the current appetite (perhaps even now passing into the realm of 10 minutes ago) is for large-scale photography.

The best-known of the artists who traffic in big pictures are the German photographers who studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. The Bechers' reputation was made on postwar photographs of Germany's empty and inert industrial works, and the German artists who studied with them--such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, and Herr big-retrospective-at-MoMA-this-spring, Andreas Gursky--bear traces of their big, architectural aesthetic. The idea, it seems, with larger-than-life images is to create a flat work that reaches out into three-dimensional space and overwhelms the viewer. It's more theatrical than workaday photography, which does its best simply to reflect, or deflect, life as we know it.

In the current group show at Winston Wächter, New Directions in Photography, only one Höfer image represents the Düsseldorf School (as this trend is coming to be called): a print from the Casa de Labrador Arnajuez series. It's not a minimal or industrial landscape, but a palatial interior. The room is full of things to look at--trompe l'oeil murals, gilded moldings--but registers as visually empty, perhaps because of the lack of human presence. One mural, which shows horses bucolically loitering and a couple of travelers with walking sticks in a rolling landscape, has what looks like a secret panel on one wall, which alerts us to the artifice of the images (if we haven't been alerted already). It's a layer of artifice in a room that has become only artifice; in the corners of the photograph you notice that the rooms are roped off from visitors.

Absence is also crucial to Irish artist Paul Seawright's two pool images. At first they seem flat and somehow flimsy, and this is because unlike all the other works in the show, they're not installed behind glass, but mounted onto thin sheets of aluminum. The works are not enormous, another reason why the pair seem excessively modest. But they grow on you: two dirty, deserted spaces, one a blue-tiled wall, and the other an overflowing outdoor pool. Despite the disuse, there is a serenity, counterintuitive and perhaps dependent on the viewer's mood.

The problem, however, with this show, is that it feels pieced-together. These are artists, I think, whose works need to be seen in whole series to fully feel their impact. One black-and-white image by Shirin Neshat, whose work includes the stunning films Rapture and Fervor (and really, really needs to be brought to Seattle), isn't enough. Neshat's territory is the contained universe of the Muslim woman, the source and the manifestation of identity and ideology. The single image in the gallery shows two chador-covered women in an uneven and barren landscape, with six more women and a stone wall in the background. In this show, the photograph is effective inasmuch as it recalls the seriousness, sensuality, and foreboding of Neshat's other work (which, I think, is part of owning a piece of artwork--that you own a part of the artist's whole oeuvre). My companion, at the exhibition's opening, took one look at Neshat's work and said, "I got over that kind of thing after U2's Joshua Tree." I smacked him upside the head, but I knew what he meant.

The kind of series I'm talking about is an installation by Cuban-born artist Rene Pena at Suyama Space. In a series of large photographs--about five feet by three feet, by my inexact measurement--Pena gives us his body, up close. Now, the body as landscape has been done to death, but these images do something else. His bellybutton, his knuckle, his ass don't lazily celebrate one particular human, but become generalized, de-individualized. The closer you get, the more the body dissolves into an expanse of pattern; the best image is of a nipple, which looks like a volcano in a desert seen from outer space. The series conspires to turn the idea into an ideology, a statement too strong to ignore or reduce to a postcard.