The darkness and uncertainty of nighttime is scary for a child. Shadows play tricks on the walls. Mysterious rumbles emerge from under the closet doors. Christian Waeber's newest exhibition of photographs, "Later That Night…," now at the Panopticon Gallery of Photography, powerfully evokes memories of these fears.
Following many group exhibits, Waeber has exhibited six solo shows in the Boston area in the last four years. Originally born in Fribourgh, Switzerland, Waeber moved to Boston in 1993. He is a completely self-taught photographer who also works as a medical researcher. Over the past 20 years, Waeber has narrowed his work into studies of strictly nudes and night shots.
Nestled in the heart of the Hotel Commonwealth, the Panopticon Gallery can be difficult to find. The exhibition near Kenmore is small but certainly worth seeing. There are only a handful of Waeber's large-scale C-prints nestled in the tiny hallway of the gallery, but each one encapsulates a detailed narrative about childhood fears, all set in Boston.
His print, "Office Chair" (2008), paints a scene of old docks and a riverbank with a dilapidated office chair in the foreground. Everything is in extreme focus except for the lit skyscrapers of Boston looming across the silky texture of the black river. In the daytime, this photograph would just be a sad scene of urban waste, but in the night, with the dark purples of the sky, the chair and docks are transformed into ominous gray objects.
This phenomenon is a result of long exposure times of about five to 10 minutes. These long exposure prevent the photographs from representing one precise moment in time, but also maintains a gritty realness in the stationary objects. Because he sheds the transitory details of time in his photographs, Waeber creates an entirely new world and time separate from reality.
All of the photographs are taken digitally on a Canon 5D digital SLR camera. Many of the pinks and greens have an overly saturated, almost garishly neon quality. When he prints his images in the darkroom or uses Photoshop, Waeber plays with colored light casts, neutralizing certain areas to emphasize the natural saturation of what little light remains at night.
One of the most startling images is a photograph entitled "Dog Walker" (2006). The print is a prime example of his creation of a new reality melded with his skill in making ordinary objects petrifying. The photograph is a street scene taken in Lowell, Mass. In the center is an old sign that reads "SCHOOL ZONE," except that it is half falling off and upside down on its post. A sidewalk runs straight through the center.
Just behind the sign is a man walking his dog, but he rises in and out of the brilliant light radiating around the sign. His image is never fixed, as a result of the long exposure time. The dog walker looks like a ghost that has somehow descended from the ethereal background light source.
In the light of day, this photograph would be complacent: just another guy walking his dog. By capturing the scene during the dim light of night, however, the viewer is uncertain of what is real even though the street looks like it could be any lane of suburbia.
The Panopticon Gallery places strong inset lighting on all of its other photographs along the hallway, but the lighting over Waeber's prints is much less apparent. As a gallery, they have done an excellent job in showcasing the dark quality of his work. Unfortunately, two of Waeber's images were placed behind the main desk and are easily overlooked. It would have been a better choice to hang them in the main hallway with the rest. If grouped together, their collective effect would be even more miraculous.
