It’s possible that seeing beyond the surface of things requires a kind of dialectic, a leaping back and forth between scrutiny and gazing, between an awareness of the particular and a recognition of the general. Photographically speaking, this would suggest that one of the chief pleasures in viewing Frank Hunter’s exhibit of photographs, Lament, resides in the tension between the studio photograph and the landscape photograph, or, more plainly, between the sunflower in its amazing singularity and the multi-layered efflorescence of Nature itself. Of course there’s something unusual about this. Why not the sunflowers by themselves? Hunter’s sunflower photographs are in fact beautiful and disturbing and darkly passionate, and their exhibition would constitute a well-imagined and immensely coherent project.

Obviously the answer is that Hunter is not simply and only interested in photographs of flowers, even if his photographs, which deal not only with the beauty of flowers but their mortality, is able to transcend what usually amounts to an exercise in pure form.

Then what? The answer lies, I think, in the word Hunter has chosen to characterize this exhibition, lament, a deeply human word which derives from the Latin noun, lamenta -- weeping. I say "human" because we are the creatures who not only experience loss (perhaps all creatures do that) but who are able to transform that loss, which is fundamentally personal, into those specific and shareable forms that are sometimes called art.

The photographer -- or at least the kind of photographer who thinks about this sort of thing -- knows this well. For in all photographs the illusion exists that a moment of Time has been captured and saved from its journey somewhere. It’s a wonderful illusion, but that’s all it is. Time doesn’t merely move along, it takes with it the photographer and the child and the flower. What remains behind is the viewer, that is, the one who looks back and remembers. This is the sadness that haunts all photographs, but especially those in which our loved ones, younger then than now, appear.

This young one appears in Hunter’s photographs. In one image he stands beneath the radiating branches of a large tree whose leaves create an immense chiaroscuro of light. He is at some distance from the camera, facing away, his hands in his pocket. In other photographs the boy appears partially concealed: he holds a camera up to his eyes, a leafy branch blocks his face, the shadowed board of a fence crops his forehead. In these photographs the child -- distanced, unknowable -- is part of the blooming and loved natural world. He is on his way to manhood and eventually to sorrow. The day is on its way to evening. And the sunflower shall lose its rays and hang its head. "This is what can be known," Hunter seems to be saying. "No more." In Hunter’s photographs, many of which reach out to a poised moment of ripeness, the journey to darkness is implicit -- a sorrow that his quest for the brief moment of perfect light has taught him.

Lament.