James David Saul

Ottawa birds sit outside a prison windowpane.

From the tooting-our-own-horn department: a pair of City Paper contributors with heavy wanderlust and good eyes for composition held First Friday photo openings this month. Rick Valenzuela and James David Saul’s respective shows are both on display throughout the month of January.

Rick, last seen in these parts working with Michael T. Regan on the Stenton Ave. Reprise cover, was our copy editor and resident skate nerd in early aughts. He left CP in 2002 to take a job at a English-language daily in Phnom Phen, Cambodia, and from there I have a difficult time keeping track, but I’m pretty sure he’s hit up most major continents and Arkansas.
His photo study of the experience, Wild art, is on display at Deep Sleep (54 N. Third St.). Some of it just shows curious scenes, shot on the fly; there’s a crowd gathered outside a R.A.M.B.O. gig in Thailand, or a bunch of African children marching to protest the conditions of their schools…which, when you read the accompanying caption, make Philly’s beleaguered district seem like the freaking Shipley School. The captions are part of the show’s strength; the title "Wild art" is journo-jargon for stand-alone images run in daily newspapers, and Rick treats his pictures as such, giving each a detailed caption in a small rectangle to the lower right.
While I think some images are mostly cool for what you’re seeing in them (for instance, a shot of Gambian president Yahya Jammeh smearing HIV-positive villagers with his own home-brewed herbal cure, which he keeps in an Evian bottle), Rick’s best stuff frames two subjects that seem to have no business being together. From Little Rock, we see a peculiar black and white of a very real woman trying to save a very artificial giant clown, whose inflatable body was knocked over by the wind. In Dakar, Senegal, a surfer rides a wave in one direction while a fisherman paddles a skiff in the opposite, creating this vivid clash of contemporary-versus-traditional.

Rick Valenzuela

Around the time Rick was leaving CP, James was just getting started, first as Mike Regan’s intern, then as a music intern, then a general contributing writer and photographer; he most recently showed up on The Clog with tasty visuals of the Spring Garden Market.
James’ wanderings have stuck primarily to the North American continent, and his self-titled show at 1 Shot Coffee, 601 Liberties Walk gives even portions of people and landscapes; there’s mountain vistas and ghostly pigeons (see above) alongside kids partying at Space Jam. One particularly striking shot can be read as man invading the land: a long perspective on massive oil pipelines that run through evergreen woods in the Puget Sound region (the area where Twin Peaks was shot, the photographer points out).
Nature still lifes are one of the hardest things for me to get into, and the placid lakeside shots in this show didn’t do much for me. But the way James composed the stratified rock faces in South Dakota’s Badlands National Park seemed almost multi-dimensional, a box containing layers of dead hills in front of layers of dead hills. Anybody who’s ever been to the park will immediately relate to the broad expanse of nothingness, if you’ll pardon me sounding like a philosophizing windbag. While James’ shots from the road seem to tread lightly, almost timidly, his shots from back home display a clear sense of comfort, whether its a chaotic An Albatross crowd or a man quietly touching up a Kensington mural.

James David Saul

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Arts, First Friday, Gallery, Photos, Visual Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.