ARTnews, Summer 2004

DIETZ GALLERY
Howard Barash’s midcareer retrospective offered the first opportunity for viewers to see the private output of this photographer, who has worked commercially for over 30 years. Technically sound and carefully composed, Barash’s photographs deliver crisp objectivity and keen observation.
    The exhibition abounded with pictures of nature at various moments of the day. Barash has photographed the fog lifting off the Miramichi River in Nebraska and captured the intersection of the mountains, the hot sun, and the flat terrain in Death Valley. In New Brunswick, Canada, Barash snapped aerial images of a long highway slicing through a thick and verdant forest.
    Barash has also paid close attention to small-town America. More a mirror than anything else, his photograph Rhode Island (1987), showing a white house with an array of rainbow-colored chairs, or his image Kent, CT (1982), depicting a lakeside area, gives us glimpses of a suburban life into which blissful associations are easily inserted.
    In spite of the everyday focus that characterizes Barash’s house scenes, two photographs in the show were particularly unusual. One depicts empty lawn chairs on top of a parked Winnebago, taken in the Poconos, in Pennsylvania in 1982. In the striking absence of people, the yellow-and-brown tartan seats appear as an analogy for marriage—standing in for love and loss, anger and tenderness, happiness and woe. The other picture of note is also at one remove from direct human contact. Taken in 1975, the photograph captures the sides of two dolls, one male and one female, through a well-aged New York building. The picture is so elusive, without overt comment or decree, that it stays in the mind.

—Jane Simon