In the galleries: Intellectually engaging, visually striking and open to interpretation By Mark Jenkins
“Transmigration” by Fred Zafran, part of the Multiple Exposures Gallery show examining D.C.’s Metro rail system, contrasts deep blacks and amber light. (Fred Zafran)
Fred Zafran
Traveling through the Metro rail system, Virginia photographer Fred Zafran thought of Greek mythology. “I imagine the River Styx and ferryman Charon transporting souls of travelers,” he writes of “The Transit of Shadows: An Allegory,” his Multiple Exposures Gallery show. But viewers might envision another place, just a bit less removed from life today: the 17th-century Netherlands of Vermeer and especially Rembrandt. The contrast of deep blacks and amber light in Zafran’s pictures has an Old Master quality that makes Metro stations appear more heavenly than infernal.
That’s not the only appeal of these photos, which are impeccably composed and intriguingly ephemeral. Relatively long exposures turn commuters into ghostly apparitions, and shooting through glass produces disorientingly layered imagery. (None of the pictures are double exposures or digitally altered.) The limited palette of the underground chambers accentuates the occasional contrasting color, whether the yellow of a woman’s coat or the blue of the seats in the latest generation of Metro cars. Interestingly, only one picture depicts the new cars, whose chilly color scheme breaks with Metro’s warm original one. In that sense, Zafran’s photos document the end of a literally golden age.