CAMBRIDGE — For the STEM inclined, photography is most often associated with a science, optics. Yet it also has a robust relationship with a branch of mathematics, geometry. Part of the very considerable pleasure James Gehrt’s “A Simple Circle” affords is how the exhibition curves the medium’s usual right-angled orientation.
The shows runs at the Photographic Resource Center through March 16.
When one thinks of a photographic image — doesn’t matter whether it’s hanging on a museum wall, sitting in a photo album, staring out from a smartphone — the shape is surely rectangular. It’s a shape that’s come to be understood as defining the medium almost as much as the interplay of light and shadow does.
Brassaï, a great photographer, had no problem with such an understanding. He called photography “the daughter of the rectangle.” Robert Smithson, the land artist best known for “Spiral Jetty” (no right angles there), did have a problem with it. “Photography squares everything,” Smithson once wrote. “Every kind of random view is caught in a rectangular format so that the romantic idea of going to the beyond, of the infinite is checked by this so that things become measured.”
Pro or con, rectilinearity is taken as a given. It wasn’t for George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, back in the late 19th century; nor is it for Gehrt, who teaches at Simmons University. “A Simple Circle” pays homage to Eastman and the beginnings of popular photography. Eastman’s original camera — “You push the button, and we do the rest” was its famous slogan — was simple and inexpensive enough to let the average person take pictures; and those pictures were round. The shape has changed, of course, as has the innocence of the photographic image. But the popularity sure hasn’t.
Emphasizing the idea of homage, “A Simple Circle” includes four early Kodak cameras, and very handsome machines they are, as well as several dozen vintage photographs (all round) and such related period ephemera as advertisements, articles, and instructions.
Those items are subsidiary to Gehrt’s own 67 photographs. All are printed in a velvety black-and-white. They’re uniform in size, 10 inches by 13 inches; in presentation, matted but not framed; and in shape, as the title declares — not that there’s anything simple about circles. There are no captions or titles, which helps give a sense of the images being outside of time, as does the absence of any people in them.
Gehrt’s unfailingly handsome consistency of approach means that style subsumes content. Yet on closer inspection that content quite varied. There’s subject matter one might expect: statuary, landscapes, architectural details. There’s also subject matter one likely would not: crocodiles, a bear, a contemporary cityscape.
The uniformity of presentation makes it easy to overlook the interrelationships among given groupings. (The show was put together by Gehrt and the PRC’s program manager, Catherine LeComte Lecce.) Flanking that cityscape are a classical façade and what looks to be an elaborate 19th-century greenhouse. An escalator is next to a set of rudimentary outdoor stairs. Several of the photographs have round subjects — wheels, domes — meaning, yes, circles within circles. A photograph of an old wagon hangs alongside a covered car.
It’s not just early Kodaks that inspire Gehrt. That covered car alludes to the veiled vehicle found in Robert Frank’s “The Americans.” A particularly beautiful seascape recalls those of the (pre-Kodak) 19th-century French photographer Gustave Le Gray.
“As a photographer, I have tried to recapture the quiet unobtrusive round images from the 1890s with technology from the modern day,” Gehrt writes. “I have collected … historic round photographs over the years. Now, I am able to create modern comparisons by contrasting and juxtaposing the original Kodak images with my own images. The result is a circle that spans 133 years of visual communication and expression.”
Will the circle be unbroken? Not if Gehrt and this abundant, beguiling show can help it.
A SIMPLE CIRCLE: James Gehrt
At Photographic Resource Center, VanDernoot Gallery, University Hall, Lesley University, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, through March 16. 617-975-0600, www.prcboston.org/a-simple-circle.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.