For those who haven’t noticed, Cara Phillips and Amy Elkins have been up to more than their usual blog posts. They recently established a new website, Women in Photography, devoted to showcasing the work of contemporary female photographers. I mention it now because WIP pointed me to Julie Saul Gallery, where Sally Gall’s work “Crawl” is currently showing.
Gall’s latest body of work takes a bit of getting used to. Historically, she has more or less walked the walk of a black-and-white purist, so it’s no surprise that this new series adopts as its unspoken mantra one of the older clichés of the photographic medium: the idea that photography teaches us to “slow down” and “really look at things.” But truisms are nothing more than the generalization and endless repetition of something that starts off true, and “Crawl” really does make you slow down, although it takes time to get into the rhythm of life that Gall has chosen to photograph. Her focus on certain choice details–the tiny projecting hooks of a beetle’s feet poking off the sides of a stalk of grass, the precarious balance of a daddy longlegs straddling the gap between two distant plants–eventually wins even a skeptical viewer to her unique brand of backyard naturalism. Within a few minutes I found myself marveling at the dense jungle that a meadow becomes when seen from the perspective of a caterpillar.
That may be what separates Gall from scientific nature photographers like Alex Wild or biological photographic artists like Catherine Chalmers. The insects, arachnids, and gastropods Gall photographs feature as minute figures in a lush landscape of flowers, grass, and weeds. They are big enough to merit notice, but not so large that they become the sole object of scrutiny. They simply exist as figures against a larger background, not unlike the tiny, awed observers in Romantic landscape painting. You might say that Sally Gall has found a way to deliver to people an entirely new sense of wonder at the vastness of the world–a slug’s sense of the sublime, a reminder, to quote Thom Gunn, that most of us, looking at a snail’s trail in the undergrowth,
“would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.”
“Crawl” runs at Julie Saul Gallery from May 13 to June 28, 2008. All images © Sally Gall.
