Barney Kulok

Barney Kulok shoots straight and does not manipulate his prints, yet his color and black-and-white photographs of his minutely observed surroundings are surreal in appearance. With references to Minimalism, Land Art, and the conceptual photography of Jeff Wall, and with architectural spaces and plans as his touchstones, he explores materials, scenes, light, and shadow, and the way the camera captures them. Among his early series is “Simple Facts,” visual snippets cut from his surroundings. These range from a ghostly stain on the headrest of a car seat to a bulky form covered with a tarp, infused with humor and poetry by virtue of his precise framing. For a more recent series, “Building” (2011-12), Kulok documented subtle details scattered about the construction site of Louis Kahn’s Four Freedoms Park—each one monumentalized and infused with references in his gelatin silver prints.