Thursday night, the 26th of January, more than a thousand people packed the galleries of the reopened South Street Seaport Museum. For the first time, all three floors of gallery space in the restored historic building were used for installations, ranging from a look back to the 1600s, to contemporary film, video and photography.
The last two galleries were devoted to panorama photography, curated by Elisabeth Biondi. Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s and Sylvia Plachy’s panoramas could not be more diverse, their approach not more different.
“Jeff Liao’s work has its roots in documentary photography. He captures the visual essence of a location by photographing it over a period of time and then joins the individual pieces together digitally. This gives him the freedom to create visually coherent images of places in a specific yet sweeping representation. Like a
painter, he builds his surfaces in layers and thereby succeeds in stretching our perception of reality.
Sylvia Plachy seeks and finds her images wherever she goes. She captures fleeting moments in time with her roaming eye. She says the panoramic frame intensifies her perceptions. It allows her to get close to her subjects, to be inside their space, and to be surrounded by it — unorthodox, whimsical, and close. One senses that she does not simply compose her photographs so much as she inhabits them. They read like private pictographs — lyrical memories of what, and how, she saw.
Panoramas tend to present a neutral, distanced view. Both Jeff Liao’s and Sylvia Plachy’s photographs present the opposite. They are richly perceived and personal panoramic visions of their city.”
Elisabeth Biondi
