T he rippled watery foundations which spread across Mary Mansey’s photographs plunge into the dual nature of her recurring subject as an element—simultaneously pulling out water’s brightest reflective properties while pondering the dark depths below. Mansey captures the posts, boats and natural plant life that float upon water or root themselves down below it. Emerging from the depths they become part of the world that lakes and oceans distort upon their surfaces. Her scenes are often contemplative and serene but subtly ominous with their uses of these motifs. The earthy blues, greens and browns that Mansey brings out ring with her photographer’s comprehension of the life systems and cycles at work before her that depend on such liquid bodies. To her eye, water brings contradictions and tumultuous force, but also sustains life. The consequences of such realizations frame her chosen compositions with human implications, both emotional and practical, yet constantly fragile and all powerful. While seizing single, still moments atop the surface, Mansey also hangs her work on waves’ vibrant motions that shakes light without rest, posing philosophical dilemmas about all that calls water its home, whether growing directly from the ecosystem or working with the water as a tool of man.

G ary Auerbach’s photographs articulate a tension between durability and transience. He combines photography, a short lifespan medium, with platinum printing and the photo­engraving process, giving his work a life of 500 to 1000 years. Photo-engraving, moreover, involves the intaglio hand-wiping of every print, giving a personal touch to the finished result. Concern for permanence, in an alienating instantaneous world, may result from his life experiences. A native New Yorker, he has lived in Arizona for years: the former epitomizes contemporary society’s fleeting character, while the latter’s landscape has all the mythic solidity of pre-modern times. Regardless of its source, this thematic concern structures the medium and content of all his photographs.