Abstracts: Reflections

Salzmann is in the midst of a new series of abstractions, which use an in-camera mirroring effect, by which the digital camera records half an image and then flips it to make a synthetic symmetry. The technique is, on its face, gimmicky. The era of digital imaging is, of course, replete with such gimmickry—filters that turn any image into a fake watercolor, a fake charcoal drawing, a fake photocopy, a fake stained glass window, a fake snapshot made on expired film cross processed and bleach bypassed and three times turned to infrared and back. In some sense, the measure of an artist’s suppleness of mind is not puristic avoidance of gimmickry, but an ability to move gimmickry past gimmicks. The best of Salzmann’s “Reflections” photographs manage to do just this, by approaching the doubling effect as a means to bend the abstraction toward the return of the figure.