by Leah Ollman

Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2006

Mark Citret's thoroughly pleasant photographs at White Room wrest significance from unlikely sources. They are not major statements on lofty subjects. Quite the opposite: They are small, quiet pictures born of acute observation of the everyday.

Citret is as likely to find a handsome harmony of forms in a public restroom as in a garden. One of the images in this selection spanning 15 years shows a receding row of portable toilets. Its composition is as crisp and distilled as a nearby picture of a single leaf glued by moisture to the hood of a truck.

Citret practices landscape photography of the most inclusive sort, encompassing the urban, industrial and synthetic, the unintentionally beautiful as well as the innately so. There's no flab in his pictures, nothing extraneous or gratuitous.

A Bay Area photographer, Citret has the sensibility of a Post-minimalist: He pares down to the essentials of plane, line, pattern, rhythm, light and shadow, but within that clean geometry he recognizes the presence of chance, organic processes of change and a hint of pathos.

The coexistence of order and chaos is neatly visualized in a photograph of an open phone book, its pages in swollen, crinkly disarray. It's set against the cool order of a cinderblock wall with twin pipes curving down like arrows pointing to the anomaly. What Citret does too is point to readily available secrets. Each image is akin to a nod of recognition, slight but refreshing.