UW News

February 5, 2004

Photo exhibits showcase scenes from far away and close to home

News and Information

Black and white photos capturing the movement of water and the “liquid light” of the Northwest by one of the region’s best-known photographers, Mary Randlett, and a separate exhibit of photos from France by a UW professor known to keep his eyes open for the enigmatic, the quizzical and, occasionally, the bizarre, are now on display at the School of Marine Affairs.


A reception last week with Randlett and Warren Wooster, professor emeritus of marine affairs and fisheries, kicked off the exhibition that is open to the public and on display through winter quarter at the Marine Studies Building, on Southwest campus, 3707 Brooklyn Avenue. Visitors can see the exhibits 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., weekdays.


The beauty of being an oceanographer is it takes you so many interesting places, Wooster says.


He’s visited on the order of 50 countries as close as he can count — nations splintering apart in recent times has made the keeping track a bit more difficult — and has worked in the Arctic, Antarctic, South America and Indian Ocean, among other remote and picturesque places.


With him always has been a trusty camera or two.


Wooster, whose work focuses on international cooperation in marine science and who has studied the effects of such things as ocean and climate conditions on fish distribution and abundance, first went to France in the early ’60s. Wooster was the first secretary of the newly created Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He lived there two and a half years and has returned many times since.


The 16 black and white photos he selected for this exhibit span 25 years of visits since the early ’70s and range from a patron prone on a bench in a Paris subway to fishing vessels in the Brittany village of Roscoff to wigs displayed at a flea market.


The interaction of light, form and contrast is what draws him to shoot in black and white, Wooster says.


Those qualities also define the work of Randlett’s black and white images that are on display. Long known for her documentary photography of Northwest artists, Randlett has increasingly emphasized nature in her photography.


She is intrigued by water and is described as being a master at capturing transient images that form as water refracts and reflects light. She captures that interplay in such things as the wakes created by birds and boats, from wave patterns around rocks and fish just below the surface of the water.


The exhibit includes photos taken in the last 35 years, mostly in Puget Sound and the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia.


Tom Leschine, director of the School of Marine Affairs, and his wife Kit O’Neill became friends with Randlett about 10 years ago. Leschine finds special appeal in her photographic abstractions drawn from the marine environment.


“Part of what we do at SMA is try to teach our students to look at the marine environment and marine environmental problems in new ways, in part as a creative form of problem solving,” Leschine says. “I realized some time ago that in her artistic approach, Mary was doing about the same thing I do when I teach marine policy analysis. Both seem to rely on deconstruction and a directed sort of abstraction from reality.”


Randlett’s work is held in permanent collections nationwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has been included in 90 exhibitions in the past 25 years, more than 30 of which have been one-person shows. The UW Libraries announced in 2001 that it was acquiring Randlett’s entire photographic output from the past half century.