by Rick Deragon

Monterey Herald, February 4, 1993

One doesn't quickly assign adjectives such as "emotional" to photographic subjects like construction or excavation sites, nor does one think of the mechanical device, the camera, as a tool that renders emotion readily. For on the construction site, one finds calculation and impersonality; on the excavation site heartlessness, persistence.

Without conscience, the camera records what is before it in all the subject's detailed splendor, outdoing the human eye in what can be captured and, therefore, studied, in an instant. It is the camera's ability to document, to both devour and delineate pictorial fact, that has kept us fascinated for decades.

It is the art of photographer to be able to transform the documentary characteristic of the camera/film into an expression of the photographer's sensibilities. With mastery of the rudiments of mechanics, an eye for the special moment of exposure, and an instinct for a photographic vision—a melding of intellect, sight and insight—the fine-art photographer selects and captures on film the fleeting moment.

Two unlikely subjects are explored in series by two photographers at the Center for Photographic Art at Sunset Center in Carmel. In a duel exhibition titled Vast Endeavors, Mark Citret and Joel Leivick examine their subjects in two bodies of work that complement each other. Each photographer's series is a singular statement; but the two series, paired as they . are, play off each other, and add to the complexity of both.

Citret looks at diverse aspects of a massive building project on the dunes near San Francisco, a sewage-treatment plant, and how the structure gradually takes shape over weeks in the coastal fog and sun.

Leivick turns his viewfinder to the quarries in the mountains above Carrara, Italy. His pictures show how workers scrape, cut and burrow into the earth's crust to extract the brilliant Carrara marble.

Because of their technique and viewpoint, Citret and Leivick have transformed these places of labor into visual operas, grandiose stages of human drama.

Citret's photographs show the earth's face transformed by steel and concrete, with forms rising willfully, systematlcalty, in a choreographed dance of geometry and light. Leivick's photographs, in contrast, show the earth transformed by subtraction; culture's willful plunder of massive stone leaves magnificent scars across mountains, and creates awesome caverns within the cold bowels of the earth.

In both Citret's "Construction Site Series" and Leivick's "Carrara and Other Photographs of Italy," emotion, a tragic sense, is communicated through the transformation within each series's subject.

Citret's pollution-control plant begins as a deep, massive hole in the ground, then grows rectilinear walls of reinforced concrete and, finally, slab ceilings that shut out the sunlight. Caressed, by light and fog, the building-in-progress seems an attractive monument to engineering: repeating steel rods, rhythmic patterns of walls, sheer mass of concrete combine to declare power, achievement—progress.

Instead of the impassive rendering a construction, Citret has depicted a tragic sense of loss in his treatment of the site. In its geometry and repeating forms, we find the satisfaction of a balanced equation; in the light, shadow and solitude, we see the terrible beauty lurking within the cold chambers.

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In their ways, Citret and Leivick explore transformation, how the change of something can be read, experienced, for itself, as well as for what it implies. Transformation, an enduring theme, commands attention, for within its changes, we see models of our own experience.