Peter Dreyer is an artist with a consummate eye who uses his camera to create elegant black-and-white compositions inspired primarily by nature. You can see his new exhibition at the Edgartown library through the end of June. The framed prints are also available for purchase by contacting the photographer.
Dreyer traveled an interesting route to depicting the natural world. He hails from Germany, and came to the U.S. to be not a photographer, but a translator for the Christian Science Monitor in 1962. About five years later, his focus began to shift: “I had been very interested in filmmaking, and the Christian Science Church started a film and broadcasting department.” By that time, he had taken industrial filmmaking courses, which led him to shoot 35-mm slide shows for the church. “So,” he says, “you had to start learning lighting people.” Dreyer continued perfecting his lighting skills when he went off on his own, eventually shifting to shooting commercial corporate industrial stills.
In his fine art photography today, Dreyer continues to take particular delight in playing with light in various ways. For instance, there are his photograms, which create unusual images. With straight photographs, you shoot a negative and then print from it. In photograms, however, you construct images by placing objects on a sheet of photographic paper and then exposing the paper to light. The object leaves a white footprint, while the area around it will appear gray to black in tone. Each print is unique, depending on slight differences in the placement of the object.
Examples include Dreyer’s “Curlicue” series, in which he twists strips of sturdy photo paper to create arching curves that stand out white against a dark background. He says, “I’m after the curves and the general composition.” He particularly likes the abstract nature of the photographs, each of which creates a visual rhythm all its own.
Equally as abstract are his photographs of ice, titled “Free Frames,” which he mainly took in Dover, at Noanet Woodlands, where he lugged his cumbersome 4-by-5 camera over the river and through the woods. The images in the frozen, icy surface create a mysterious play of black-and-white tones and subtle shades of gray. We can almost hear the crunch, as if we were walking through the landscape on a cold winter’s day.
His photograph-photograms, though, are even more enigmatic. Here Dreyer combines photograms and continuous-tone photographs. The results are both ghostly and gloriously exotic. In “Queen Anne’s Lace,” Dreyer superimposes the real item on top of a photograph of one. He experiments even further in “Maple Leaf,” where you see three leaves, with the light gray one shining through the darker-toned large leaf on top, and a tiny, strikingly white leaf silhouette floating to the left that accents the composition. The combination of the two techniques creates an otherworldly atmosphere in “2 Shadow Bottles”; the pair of vessels are mere shadows, but the crisply detailed flowers are precisely aligned in front of them, appearing as though they are actually standing up in the bottles.
Dreyer and his wife, Adele, who had vacationed on the Island with their children in the ’70s and early ’80s, moved here full-time in 2012. Today, much of his work is inspired by the Vineyard. His elegant, ultra-extreme close-up in “Feather No. 1,” found on an Island beach, has grains of sand still scattered over its irregular surface, making the found object come alive.
Another innovation of his is what Dreyer calls “reverse-reflex,” which are stunning visual palindromes that can be viewed either right-side up or upside-down. Explaining the technique, he says, “I overrode the double exposure. I didn’t advance the film. I turned the camera 180°, and shot exactly the same image. I got this effect, and I liked it a lot. You have to figure out what it is.” Initially, these photographs may look confusing, until you detect that the top and bottom portions are exactly the same image facing each other, meeting seamlessly in the center. The Vineyard images include “On-Time Ferry,” which he took from up high on Memorial Wharf. Here you see On-Time Ferry II and On-Time Ferry III in a doppelganger crisscrossing from Edgartown to Chappy. Perhaps most intriguing is the one of the meeting of the triangular peaked roofs in “Edgartown Roof,” which creates an ever-shifting central pyramid, making the photograph an homage to the artist M.C. Escher.
Dreyer shares, “My main interest in photography is to create black-and-white images that are original and visually interesting, whether they are made from negatives or in the form of photograms, or combinations of the two.”
For Dreyer, “an artist with photographic equipment is not limited to what’s in front of a camera. He can create vistas from his imagination.” And that’s exactly what he offers us in his elegant exhibition.
