A View Of The City
Fionán O’Connell, The National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.
Upstairs at the Rotunda Gallery, the photographs of two artists, American John Rosenthall and Irishman Fionán O’Connell, present a more intimate take on the subject of cities. And both are highly individual.
Of the twain, O’Connell’s is the more captivating vision. His are also the most recent images, virtually all having been made in the past two years. This artist concentrates on bits and pieces, visual snippets of several cities that in toto form what amounts to a complex montage. Where Leigh Behnke’s towering buildings and grand views in the gallery downstairs force us to consider the urban experience as a complete and complex environment, O’Connell’s brightly coloured close-up studies- of yellow lines on the streets of Dublin or a paint-spattered manhole in Boston- allow us to stop and consider the individuality of the minutae.
There is a special poignancy to O’Connell’s pictures. Vivid and sharply focussed, often taken from odd angles that cut their subjects in half or otherwise obscure portions of them, they beautifully convey a sense of place, of context,. In some respects, the viewer feels a greater familiarity with, say, Parnell Street in Dublin just from the image of the top half of an old Georgian doorway than he would with a wide-angle shot showing the whole neighborhood.
To O’Connell, then, the life of the city-any city-is best apprehended in the mundane details, which prove not so mundane after all in the vision of the right artist.
Michael Welzenbach The Washington Post, Saturday, February 1st, 1992.
