Blue Horizon, Santa Rosa Island

2005

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“Island Passages: Artists Celebrate the Channel Islands” is on view at the Ventura County Museum of History & Art through May 29.

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Among 27 artists from whom the Ventura County Museum commissioned new work to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Channel Islands National Park and National Marine Sanctuary, six were photographers. Most examples I saw of their work were the sunny pictures that the occasion would appear to call for.

Isabel Gomes’ imagery was different, in part because she used a primitive camera--either a pin-hole type with no lens or, in this case, a plastic toy. Gomes favors the moody result she gets from this equipment because it looks like the sort of photograph a Pictorialist might have made a century ago of a wood lot near where she grew up in Lowell, Mass.

In this shot, the shape of the opening in the clouds mirrors exactly the way the water meets the coastline, thereby suggesting the self-contained perfection in which nature is preserved here. Yet the dimness of the photograph makes this state of nature seem a distant memory. Like all Pictorialist work, this picture is tinged--or rather, toned--with nostalgia and regret for something now lost.