Past Lives

Past Lives, Martha Casanave's first book of photographs, clearly demonstrates her fertile eye and her widely ranging sensibility. The book's five sections--Portraits, Nudes, Narratives, An American in the Soviet Union and Out in the Cold: Leningrad in Winter--reveal strikingly different facets of a single photographic vision. Portraits finds people, often couples, straightforwardly posed but clearly comfortable in their own habitats. These familiar surroundings provide a rich context for the eloquence and individuality of the faces. Nudes, on the other hand, lets bodies speak for themselves more formalistically. Casanave has found a density of posture and backdrop, of figure and ground, that is highly expressive. Narratives moves into a mysterious world of moody drama, of shadowy presences, caught motion, half-glimpsed encounters. An American in the Soviet Union is a lively suite of tinted images, plunging right into the midst of life, but "colored" by a foreigner's heightened receptivity, Leningrad in Winter surprises us with an entirely unexpected glimpse of the atmosphere and spirit of another place. These chilly prospects, almost entirely unpeopled, were captured with a pinhole camera. Their consequent blur arrives in the eye like an already distant memory. Past Lives offers an unusually varied portfolio of this prize-winning photographer's work from the past fifteen years.