Chandi Kelley Chandi Kelley's black and white silver gelatin prints have a crisp and highly contrasted look. They also reference personal and literary content. Here "The Past is a Locked Door" (2008).

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Julie Wolsztynski Julie Wolsztynski's series, "Rue Longchamp" features the female model in deeply colored interiors. She focuses on form, color and line, with a sense of classic detachment from content.
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Esther Hidalgo Esther Hidalgo's series "Mutations" captures the body bent into strange and nearly unrecognizable shapes. Her compelling images are unmanipulated color film prints. This is #10 in the series.

Chandi Kelley Chandi Kelley's black and white silver gelatin prints have a crisp and highly contrasted look. They also reference personal and literary content. Here "The Past is a Locked Door" (2008).

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“Magnifying Memories…Isolating Ideas,” an exhibit of the work of three young women photographers, is on view at the Adah Rose Gallery in Kensington. Apart from some thematic parallels, the three are linked by the fact that all have returned to film developed in the darkroom — two creating color prints, the third, high contrasted black and white silver gelatin prints. All see film as a liberating medium, offering greater control by demanding greater technical ability with the camera itself, but also presenting a certain set of limitations that create clear parameters for their work.

French-born Julie Wolsztynski came to the Washington, D.C. metro area in 2010 and has since been exhibiting regularly. The 2008 graduate of Centre Iris in Paris is thoroughly trained in traditional and contemporary photographic techniques. Her approach to photography is reminiscent of that of painters. Unlike the photographer who waits for the perfect shot, who jumps out of the car to catch the unrepeatable moment, Wolsztynski contemplates her idea conceptually in what she terms a “pre-photographic monologue,” a slow maturing process in which the image slowly takes shape in her mind. It is then that she creates the object for the photograph, whether, as here, in her “Rue Longchamp” series focusing on the female nude in interior settings, or on “Junk Food,” a series exhibited during Foto DC last year.

It took Wolsztynski many years to determine how she wanted to photograph the female nude, and this slow process of composition is evident in the results. There’s a certain sense of detachment in these pictures, and an emphasis on form rather than content. The body and its environment are unified in overall compositions whose shape is more significant than what is being represented. Untitled, the artist seems to want to avoid narrative or story, and concentrate on line and color.

To make this series, Wolsztynski used color slide film in the oldest double-lens Roloflex camera she could find. The prints made from these slides are rich in color, with a depth of form that only is possible with this medium. I particularly liked “Rue Longchamp #2,” with its neo-classical clarity of form and cold colors, and “#6” that pictures a body lying on glass, its reflection in icy blues coming from daylight pouring in from a window behind. Again, it’s the formal emphasis here that maintains a distance from the content, thus suppressing the potential sensuality of the subject.

Esther Hidalgo’s series “Mutations” focuses on even more abstract representations of the female body, working to prevent narrative by altering the form so completely that it can only be uneasily deciphered, if at all. Similarly untitled, Hidalgo’s images also are color prints from film, with a strong sense of volume, light and shadow. The artist folds the model in what must have been excruciating positions for these photos, taking defined areas that are isolated from the idea of figure. With traces of skin surface and occasional anatomical details they connote the human body rather than represent it. Hidalgo obtains these distortions without significant manipulation of the image — impossible in the darkroom. Instead, it is her elaborate process of composing and handling the camera that achieves results that, at least to my mind, suggest a painting aesthetic. Montgomery County-based painter Sumita Kim’s biomorphic forms immediately come to mind here, as well as that artist’s inspirations in the work of Francis Bacon.

With a degree in photography from the Corcoran College of Art & Design, Chandi Kelley also is well equipped to work in the darkroom. Her series of crisp, black and white silver gelatin prints, “More than Words,” was inspired by the experience of discovering her deceased grandfather’s locked diary. It had remained closed in her mother’s bedside drawer for more than 30 years. Given the opportunity to open it, she resisted, deciding, she says, that the remaining mystery of her grandfather’s life was more powerful “than anything she might find in those pages.”

Kelley’s prints also are composed in a slow and exacting manner. In “The Past is a Locked Door,” the diary is placed on the ground, a pile of stones around it. An old-fashioned key carefully is placed on top, and two others nearby. The shadows across the locked volume create a feeling of ominous, ghostly presence. Photographing the diary in 2008 led Kelley to think about making the series that features books as subjects, speaking in their own mysterious voices. “Three Acts” shows an unusual edition of “Alice in Wonderland” with the text printed in script, and just unfocused enough that it can’t be read. A printed illustration shows Alice cramped into a rectangle after she takes the pill that makes her grow large. A doll’s head lays on the opposite page, its decapitated body lying to the left of the book. The Red Queen’s “Off with her head!” comes immediately to mind — without the words.

Kelley has two other photographs in the gallery that are not properly part of the exhibit, but are related to the theme of books. These are digital color prints that feature a series of library bound books set on a bookshelf against thematic wallpaper. “Timelines” require a patient collecting of these books so that the titles on their spines might read as a poem. The plain single color bindings allow the words of the titles to stand on their own; the endless possible combinations of them to create another story. Appropriate book ends complete the images. Kelley’s literary sensibility combined with her photographic skills promise more interesting work from this still very young artist.