If Santayana was right in suggesting that “to the art of working well, a civilized race would add the art of playing well,” then it’s reasonable to conclude that Americans have been able to take this concept of what it means to be “civilized” to rather dramatic extremes.

We do this with an intensity of purpose that leads us to build not simple amusement parks, but shrines and temples that serve as monuments to our own nostalgia and sanctuaries from contemporary reality.

Here in Florida, as I write this, the siren calls of these deities to escapism constantly beckon, spouting corporate propaganda and reminding us that, as C. Wright Mills noted, the “mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.”

In establishing this kind of mass-produced distraction, the amusement behemoths lurking in Orlando use, as their common template, the most famous of their predecessors, the fabled Coney Island. Perhaps the first of the great amusement parks, dating back to the mid-1880s, it is still a name that conjures images of a simpler, more innocent, era, although today it’s probably considered rather passé by most.

Now the focus of an exhibition of photographs by Gary Beeber at the Lyceum Gallery at the eastern campus of Suffolk Community College in Riverhead, Coney Island confronts the viewers of this exhibition with images that are singularly powerful in their evocation of this mother of all amusement parks as more than just another historical landmark in our
sociological evolution.

Striving to convey its soul, rather than mere structure, Mr. Beeber is able to convey a sense of solitude that is redolent of nostalgia but in a way still remarkably bereft of mawkish sentimentality, even as he pays homage to Coney Island’s ultimate artificiality and plasticity.

He accomplishes this by framing his images in such a way as to create certain unasked questions and spinning mysteries that remain unanswered and unsolved even after repeated viewings. Completely absent any figuration, the photographs nevertheless reflect a definite human presence, perhaps more spectral than corporeal.

Strangely enough, however, as much as the work is physically all about structures on a literal level, it is the absent element of humanity that is still the primary focus of the works. As Marek Bartelik wrote of Mr. Beeber, his photographs “often depict the shadows of things rather than the things themselves.”

This is particularly true in “Entrance” and “Eldorado Arcade,” both of which are images that seem rather sad and shopworn but still perpetually offer possibilities of a past, and future, more promising than the present. The latter is particularly powerful in its installation, as the left panel in an unrelated triptych of pictures that also includes “Sausage” and “Souvenir.”

On another level entirely, Mr. Beeber’s work shows a fascinating cognizance of how aesthetic elements of Coney Island have crept into other realms and areas of art history and pop culture. Creating immediate connections, and occasionally juxtapositions, between bright coloration and negative space, he uses the central imagery to make references to pop culture metaphors that can trace their roots back to iconographic Coney Island motifs.

It would be difficult, for example, to look at “Happy Ride” and not think of the weird creatures populating the work of Kenny Scharf. Nor is it a stretch to see how images such as those found in “Signage, Coney Island” profoundly influenced artists such as Robert Indiana. Further, anyone who has listened to or read the lyric sheets to Bruce Springsteen’s “Sandy” would have a difficult time pondering Mr. Beeber’s “Tilt-A-Whirl” without experiencing a stab of recognition.

For those familiar with the 20th century avant-garde, Mr. Beeber acknowledges a reverence for constructivist principles in his obvious paean to a contemporary adulation of the positive possibilities of technology itself: In “The Famous Cyclone” he harkens back to the absolute joy that amusement parks represented in manifesting the possibilities of relaxation for the working class, even as he calls to mind the powerful image of Russian revolutionary art in its evocation of Tatlin’s seminal (yet never constructed) tower monument to the Third International.

The exhibition of photographs by Gary Beeber, “Happy Ride, Pictures from Coney Island,” continues at the Lyceum Gallery at Suffolk Community College’s Eastern Campus in Riverhead through April 30.

© The Southampton Press, 2004

Gary Beeber’s photographs often depict the shadows of things rather than the things themselves, as if following Plato’s cave analogy: we witness the outer world as a series of shadows intermingled with our own shadows, and as our eyes adjust to the darkness around us, they allow us to believe that these flickering images are real; we experience reality through secondhand information and sensations.

Beeber selects the subjects of his works, be it a benign fragment of a wall or a broken piece of sidewalk, for their hidden beauty and aesthetic order. He treats gravestones and funerary statues with the same respect as giant commercial billboards and pieces of discarded machinery. He magnifies “insignificant” deteriorating details, or their “unexpected” juxtapositions, revealing evanescent qualities of reality, without consciously searching for meaning. His photographs, denuded as they are of people, depict their subjects as more timeless and monumental than perhaps they are. By doing so, Beeber follows in the footsteps of numerous photographers, who have traveled, each of them individually, to various locations, while often enduring the serious discomforts of a long journey-because they desire to record and fix the facts and mysteries of life and death. In their travels, they often discover, by chance or by sagacity, things they do not seek.

Beeber described his journey: “While walking through the crematorium at Dachau, I came upon, and photographed, some very eerie shadows, and it dawned on me that people who walked through those rooms on the way to their death, saw the very same shadows. In New Orleans, I photographed the tomb of Marie Levau, who was a noted Voodoo Queen. I found it fascinating that people leave offerings and draw hex signs on the walls of her tomb hoping for a miracle. In the Midwest, I discovered and shot a repository of toilets, sinks, and toilet parts which were laid down in such a way that they resembled tombstones.”

Beeber’s Flex prints in this exhibition depict a bizarre group of sites. What kind of commonalties exist between a toilet cemetery in the Midwest and a fragment of the steps in front of the Italian designer Gianni Versace’s mansion in the South Beach section of Miami (a marker of a grotesque murder and equally grotesque pilgrimages) or between funerary statues in New Orleans and the Wall of Death in the concentration camp in Dachau, Germany? Juxtaposing these places seems to defy common logic. However, Beeber’s choice of places does not glorify relativism in the prevailing manner of contemporary art. Instead, it reflects the imaginary aspect of his journey, undertaken along a trajectory that is both disturbing and enchanting.

We are invited here to experience sudden shifts in the perception of reality, as if the world in front of us were transformed from ordinary to hyperreal to ghostly. The devout admirer of photography, Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll), portrayed such a state of perpetual ambiguity in an enchanted manner in the beginning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Alice falls into the rabbit hole and as she lifts up a fan and a pair of gloves dropped by the White Rabbit she observes: “Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual.” One might experience a similar sense of bewilderment in front of Beeber’s masterly executed photographs, trying to pinpoint what experience they evoke.

“Photography” - Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography- “can be mad or sane, wild or well-behaved: well-behaved if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits (leafing through a magazine at the barber-shop); mad if this realism is absolute, restoring the very letter of Time to the amorous and agonized consciousness: a moment which reverses the course of things and which I call the photographic ecstasy.” For Barthes, every photograph stands for the intromissive “return of the dead.” To me, Beeber’s images pass by us as extromissive immortal reflections-made of beams of light that travel from the photographer to the photographed.

Marek Bartelik, an art critic and writer lives in New York and teaches art history at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

©2000 by Marek Bartelik

Gary Beeber is one of the most fascinating artists to work the contemporary scene of photography in the United States. Through his photographs of monuments, architectural objects, and design elements, Gary Beeberâs traveling camera has documented strange, intriguing and symbolic images from around the world. With the eye of the artist being fundamental to discovering the precise objective at the precise moment, his photographs have the quality that Marcel Duchamp attributed to the " found object."

Beeber carefully monitors and controls each stage of the printing process until he is satisfied with the end result, sometimes after many test prints have been rejected. Starting the 4th of August, a sample of his photography will be on view at the Gallery Merz in Sag Harbor, Long Island, NY.

In this case, his photographic interest is in the passage of time and how it affects our perception of reality. By dissecting fragments of architectural walls, tombs, ornaments and details to show their deterioration, Beeber achieve his intentions. This is evident when he focuses on cemeteries, mutilated and left to the predatory instincts of vandals or the corrosive effects of the climactic elements; tombs that were once crowned by splendid, now broken, religious icons show the passage of time.

The camera of Beeber has also documented his fascination with the history of art. Wonderful photographs of the Art Deco district of South Beach, Miami show the interaction of light and shadow in the context of colors and decorative figures. As in the best tradition of Piet Mondrian, they suggest compositions that are geometric.

History can be outlined in the beautiful designs of the Renaissance architecture of Florence (Italy). His photographs create nostalgic images of poetic calmness in which sensual shades and rustic textures play a powerful role. It is here where one understands that the renaissance offers rough and smooth surfaces, which can be flat or undulated, with dark and luminous characteristics that become significant aspects of expressionist nature. With their irregular spots, graffiti, peelings, cracks, fungi and rays, these walls are in truth a weather chart caught in a fleeting moment of their existence.

Beeber's personal aesthetic focuses on the most beautiful aspects of ordinary objects, such as a tiny Islamic window in the middle of a massive wall in Morocco; the mutilated religious figures on the tombs of the old cemetery of San Juan, Puerto Rico, or the hidden enchantment of a rural house in the periphery of Rome.

Nevertheless in a final analysis, his photographs are a tribute to the anonymous architects, humble bricklayers, stonecutters and numerous craftsmen who left a legacy of material ideas that are now a work of art, captured through the eye of Gary Beeber as a gesture of admiration and respect for their efforts.

Of the 14 artists on display in "Photo 2000," Gary Beeber, with five pieces in the show, has the widest representation and the closest affinity with the overall gallery theme of Architectural Geometry. His pieces here, in color, clearly show indebtedness to the vintage school of black and white, but also significant divergence. Architectural sections, not wholes, attract him, objects not figures. He favors darkness not so much for contrast as for setting mood and creating atmosphere, usually unsettling. "Flat Iron Detail," for example, an actual and highly original shot of the Flat Iron building, juxtaposes textures and planes, contrasting basket weave design and fluted columns, the two separated by a large dark area. Another Beeber trait is to use odd tints and hues. In "Odd Detail, Florence," a yellow-ochre plane dominates the sunlit structures, creating an odd, perhaps uneasy stillness. Though not a comforting picture, it is a compelling one. In "Shadows, Arizona," a 20" x 30" flex print, gray-green background trees draw attention in spite of the bold, zebra-like patterning of sun and shade that marks the foreground. The picture, the largest in the show, demands to be "read" as well as seen: Something is missing, it seems to say, it is too quiet here, and empty, something has happened. In this regard Beeber exemplifies (but does not overdo) the major change that has overtaken photography from the days of Brehme and Abbott: photographic skills put to the service of narrative or symbolism.

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But it is Gary Beeber's strikingly theatrical, slightly ominous flex prints that command immediate and lasting attention. Deservedly so. One, a 20" x 30" angled black and white of a barred window silhouetted against a gray, pock-marked wall - the whole surrounded by gloom, raises gooseflesh. The other, an eerily beautiful 20" x 30" black and white night shot - a few trees slanting against a lighted expanse, wisps of black vine elegantly dripping into the light - suggests a set for Wagner's "Gštterdammerung." No titles. Then the shocker. The gallery handout indicates that these are concentration camp photographs - of Dachau. The viewer is stopped cold, compelled to take a more studied look. "Shadow in Hitler's Death Factory" now takes on the appearance of a crooked cross or swastika. "Wall of Death" chillingly insinuates itself as cascading fire, the scene of human burning. The remaining two photos, less lethal, assume a grim reality: "Monument to Prisoners' Barracks 1" (20" x 20")," a grey slate numeral one, a small, yellow-white stone sitting atop, is positioned slightly off center in low relief on a pebbly granite square, the symbolism immediately apparent to Jews as a memorial tribute. "Looking Through the Gate of Hell" (20" x 20"), the one color photograph in this oddly gorgeous collection, forces the viewer to look through peeling lavender grillwork onto a sunny open field beyond. The words TIEBRA and under, IERF THCAM, the infamous concentration camp motto, shot in reverse and from the inside, slows down recognition, as the scene, so tranquil, so mocking, slowly impresses itself on the viewer's consciousness. Here are stunning examples of subject and sentiment organically linked to angle, texture, and form. Nowhere is there a human figure. No need.

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"Gary Beeber's photos are straightforward, tightly cropped, colorful images of architectural details, very elegantly composed."

Robert Long, East Hampton Star, 11-27-01