Review of Pete Turner show at the George Eastman House

“Color Me Beautiful: Photographer Pete Turner is Empowered by Color”

A photograph has the uncanny ability to rediscover for its viewers the beauty that they recurrently experience, but fail to give sufficient attention – or, as famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson famously coined, photographs represent a “decisive moment” where even the most basic object or event can be striking if captured in the right fraction of time. Photographer Pete Turner mastered the art of the “decisive moment” early in his career and combined it with a flair for surreal color and striking composition in a time when color photography was used almost exclusively for commercial purposes; unfortunately, Turner’s newer work sacrifices his old talents to focus solely on experiments with color, a boring and safe move for a once risky master.
Currently on display at the George Eastman House through February 4, 2007, Empowered by Color is a retrospective of Pete Turner’s 40-year career. A modest collection of about 50 photographs are on display, hung in semi-chronological order with the newest work on the far right wall and the oldest on the far left.
“Times Square,” 1957, is the most hauntingly beautiful of Turner’s older work. A thick blue haze envelops a deserted Times Square at night; a stoplight stands in the middle of the shot, extraordinarily displaying red, yellow and green simultaneously. The long-exposure shot makes the viewer aware of the sad truth that time is fleeting and yet, the lights gives us pause by asking us to do the impossible – stop and go concurrently. It is here that Turner weds surrealism, color and the decisive moment with aplomb.
On the opposite wall is one of Turner’s newer photographs, “Fronds,” 2004, a brightly colored image of palm fronds in front of a bright-orange wall. The resulting photograph is more like a southwestern postcard cover than a Turner masterpiece. The decisive moment is of no importance here and the colors, though extravagant, do nothing to transport us from the everyday world.
When successful, Turner’s photographs exert overwhelming colors and imposing shapes, propelling the viewer into a surreal, Technicolor world. Turner’s ability to create such striking images in a pre-digital-manipulation-world is what makes his older works so impressive and his newer work – for which Turner employs a digital camera and software – depressingly boring in contrast. Turner’s newer work is a boiled down version of the old – the “decisive moment” and surrealism have evaporated and all that is left is concentrated color.