Editor's pick: Getting it down in black and white

Photography exhibit

Saturday, September 2 through Saturday, September 16. Reception Saturday, September 2 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. River Gallery, 8 Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY. Free. 845/252-3238.

For decades now, color has been king of the screens, both big and small, dominated magazines and taken over home photograpy. It has even started to spread through newspapers. But black and white photography is a lot more than an obsolete technology. In black and white photographs, images are pared down to the bone of the form, disclosing shapes and subtleties of light with a boldness and power that color would only complicate.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the upcoming show at the River Gallery, “Life in Black and White.” The work of five photographers, each with a different vision but each relying on the uncanny ability of black and white to render the essence of things by simplification, will be on display.

In the photographs of Phil Garfield, for instance, real objects from eggs to saddles are depicted with a clarity so perfect and symmetrical that they appear rather to be geometrical abstractions. They are forms perfectly at rest, encouraging peace and meditation.

Jan Tyniek, whose works have been exhibited internationally in locales ranging from his native Poland to Bali to New York City, pulls off a similar trick with his photographs of sky, desert and arctic ice, again finding the abstract in the literal—though here the stress is on the textured, the asymmetric and the unpredictable in the natural forms.

The photographs of Eric Freeland—a veteran who has circled the globe on assignment for publications including TIME, Forbes and The New York Times—are odes to our local landscape, captured mostly in winter, the natural archetype for black-and-white expression. The same subject is prevalent in the works of Glen Lieberman, a comparative newcomer as a photographer who started his professional career as a composer, and Gabe DeLeon, who divides his time between Manhattan and Beach Lake, PA.

The River Gallery will not have room to display all the photographs on the walls; if one of the photographers catches your fancy, be sure to ask to see their reserved portfolios for hidden treasures—such as a gaggle of ostrich heads, bursting with personality, by Garfield.

There will be an artists’ reception for the exhibit from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 2. The suggested attire? Black and white.