by Jim Jordan

Artweek, March 22, 1986

Photographs, generally, are noted for the intimacy of viewing that they invite from the spectator. Unlike the majority of contemporary paintings, the photographic print's usual reduced scale and profusion of detail tend to draw the viewer into close range. Most photographs also require a cumulative viewing, a visual sorting out and storing up of perceptual impressions made as the eye travels around the image. Photographs are, on the whole, less likely to be read instantaneously, to be grasped as a formal gestalt in the manner of, for example, a work by Rothenberg or Diebenkorn.

It follows, then, that photography galleries have a few requirements that set them apart from the ordinary art gallery. For one thing, they are usually smaller, and the lighting must be flexible and extraordinarily good in order to illuminate objects that viewers study close up and from shitting viewpoints; they also should provide at least the aura of privacy for the prolonged viewing that good photographs require. The exhibition space at the University of California Extension building that has been provided for Mark Citret's fifteen-year retrospective possesses only one of the above characteristics and that in excess: it is too small.

Citret has a reputation as an architectural photographer, which fails to acknowledge his breadth of interest and the variation within his work. The current exhibition includes nineteen prints dating from 1971 to the present. They are more or less equally divided between landscape and architectural motifs. 101 California (1984) is a straight-on shot of the glass and sleet tower, filling the frame with the building's upper three levels. Citret's romanticizing of architectural forms, which he views as forms, not as social or commercial icons, is heavily dependent on chiaroscuro. By selecting viewing angles that offer high-contrast light and shadow, he imbues each structure with a personality and mood (which his own gallery statement manages to deny as his goal, though it implies that such a motive is a possibility). The brooding and slightly menacing 101 California contrasts with the arid, rather inhuman geometry of the Bank of America series; both are almost diametrically opposed to the human scale and nostalgia of his studies of the Hobart Building or Skylights, Hearst Mining Building, UC Berkeley (1985). These qualities in the latter relate to the sympathy that he invests in his landscapes, such as Desert Marsh, Zion (1982), with its lively density of bare branches, or the brilliantly detailed Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Colorado (1982).

Citret is both a traditionalist and a formalist, at least by his own definition. Another side of this photographer is present in the romantic sweep of his landscapes and the very thoughtful attention that he gives to social issues in his reflections on the work, if not in the prints themselves. Unfortunately, to return to the theme that opened this review, none of this is easy to arrive at in the setting of the present show. This exhibit of a decade and a half's work by an important artist has been relegated to a passageway, sandwiched between announcements for classes, an exit sign and an arrow to the Men's Room.