The Allen Memorial Art Museum’s most recent special exhibition, titled Philip Trager: A Retrospective, showcases the past four decades of work by renowned photographer Philip Trager. The selection of works on display demonstrates his growth in ingenuity as an artist, as well as his exploration of a wide variety of subject matter. It also displays his continued devotion to intensely dramatic compositions.

Trager has been a serious photographer since 1966, when he first published photographs of buildings and architecture. Trager dabbled in photography during his time as a student at Wesleyan University, but his main academic focus was to earn a law degree. He had originally planned to become a lawyer, as his father had done before him. In the 1970s and 80s, he put in 40 and 50 hour workweeks at his law firm, only to add another five or six hours of work daily in the darkroom as he pursued his true passion.

He kept up this demanding double life until 1992, by which time he had published six nationally acclaimed books of photography and his wife, Ina, was finally able to persuade him to quit his day job and devote to his time completely to his art.

Trager, a notable artist and photographer, has had gallery representation for many years. However, he manages to avoid the cut-throat and commercial atmosphere that comprises the contemporary art scene by taking only a small number of commissions and focusing on his projects.

Trager's last two books have been completed in collaboration with the German art book firm, Steidl. The firm allows Trager anywhere from three to five years in order to finish a work. Steidl has granted him an unusual amount of agency, and Trager has a hand in almost every part of the process of creating each book. Many of the photographs in Trager’s most recent book, Faces (2005), make up the current exhibition at the Allen.

His uniquely dramatic approach to photography is instantly clear upon entering the Stern Gallery at the Allen. Arranged somewhat chronologically, the collection nicely captures the wide variety of subject matter that comprises Trager’s work.

Beginning with his early prints of New England landscapes from the late 1960s, the exhibit has chosen a careful variety of photographs, juxtaposing his artful, dramatic perspectives of Italian villas and Parisian architecture from the 1980s and 1990s with his gorgeously stark and stylized portraits of modern dancers from the same time period.

Some of my favorite portraits were the posed pictures commissioned by the modern dance festival Jacob’s Pillow in the late 1980s.

Trager seems captivated by the ephemeral quality inherent within dance and strives to capture the emotion and drama behind movement in the stillness of a single frame. He communicates the emotion captured in a dance by placing his dancers in the natural world so that their dramatic positions are intensified by their placement in the wilds of nature in which they’re performing. The viewer is treated to deliciously strange photographs of modern dancers in wheat fields, or with the ocean or a frozen lake in the background.

One of these, “Mark Morris Dance Group” (1989), depicts five naked dancers bent over a field of grass.  The figures are all lined up, bent in the same curve. The bare fact of their nudity combined with their pose and the environment begs explanation: Are they harvesting some invisible crops?  Engaging in a weird cult ritual?  Or just trying to get a tan?

Trager writes in the introduction to his latest book, “A successful photo transcends its subject in the same way as a good poem does.” It is not his subjects that make these images so compelling. In all of his photographs, be they naked dancers swathed in tulle in a barren winter landscape, or the rough edge of an apartment complex jutting out behind the beautiful, modern curves of the Guggenheim, Trager excels in creating new worlds out of our seemingly familiar one. Rather than using his camera lens to give us what we already see, Trager transcends his subject matter to show us a startlingly new and magnetic world that we have yet to know. 

Trager’s show is in the Allen’s John N. Stern Gallery and runs now through June 10, 2007.