Review: Guillaume Zuili's double-exposure photographs

By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times
August 8, 2008

Even the simplest snapshot is a complex testament to how the past persists into the present. Then becomes now, remains now. Guillaume Zuili's photographs at Couturier complicate the matter exquisitely. Each is a double exposure, two thens fused into a now, or perhaps two nows impossibly twinned.

An accidental double exposure made in New York in 1995 launched the series of lyrical and contemplative double takes on Moscow , Lisbon , Paris , Berlin and Prague . In that first small picture, remarkable visual rhymes composed themselves spontaneously inside the camera. The diagonal ladder of a nearby apartment fire escape echoed in the zigzag lines of another, more distant. The city became a weave, a layering of patterns, a layering of temporal planes.

Fortuitous accidents still play their part in creating Zuili's in-camera double exposures, but working now with intention to layer, he appears to approach his paired shots with contrast in mind. He joins an image taken close to a subject with one taken farther, from a separate view, or he matches differing perspectives, a shot taken looking down with one taken looking across. Spatial contradictions abound, reconciling themselves on the surface of the print while conjuring great textural richness.

In an untitled image made in Moscow in 2000, a city street and a stairway merge like interlocking pieces of a vast urban puzzle. There are overlays in the picture, shadows, and perhaps reflections too. It's difficult to parse, but what matters is that the image sets the eye on a rambling adventure through improbable space. The logic of matter and perspective are abandoned, and an intriguing, conditional pictorial logic takes over. The vertical lines of a tall, distant building seem to carry through into the panels of a wall bordering the stairway shot from close by. Translucent, ghost-like cars are parked or stuck in traffic near a sign that frames an impossibly crisp view of the skyline.

Zuili, born in Paris and living in L.A. , gravitates toward urban structures with pronounced patterns: staircases, especially, but also the exterior ornamentation of buildings and the speedy arcs of railway lines. The layered compositions amplify the inherent dynamism of these shapes.

In a view from Prague , the scalloped design of a cobblestone street overlaps a broad stairway, so that the figures walking up-frame occupy a strange nether zone of confused gravity. In another image from Prague , pairing a silhouetted building with a tree, the dense foliage serves as shadowy shelter in the upper part of the picture and dissolves into more angular confetti below.

In a photograph from Berlin , silvery U-Bahn tracks slide away into the distance, liberated from a plane of bricks. Zuili uses Polaroid negative film and leaves a raw edge around each print, the layers of viscous emulsion further framing the images with contingency. The liquid deckle reminds us that every image is born of temporal if not material fluidity: Now and then intermingle, as in history, as in memory, as in dreams, like differing densities of truth.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave. , L.A. , (323) 933-5557, through Aug. 16. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.couturiergallery.com