WINCHESTER — More than 300 members of the Griffin Museum of Photography submitted work for its 31st annual Juried Members’ Exhibition. Juror Ann Jastrab selected a photograph each from 68 of them for the show. Jastrab is executive director of the Center for Photographic Art, in Carmel, Calif. Griffin executive director Crista Dix picked a photograph each from another 65 members. That group can be seen online.
The exhibition runs through Aug. 17. So does “Alina Saranti: Far From.” “André Ramos-Woodard: BLACK SNAFU” runs through Sept. 28, as do two exhibitions of recent photobooks.
It’s in the nature of juried shows to be diverse in form and content. That makes sense, since it’s in the nature of photographers to be diverse in sensibility and style. Trying to find patterns or themes here verges on parlor game — or delusion. But here goes —
Birds appear in no fewer than five photographs: Robert David Atkinson’s fittingly titled “If I Could Only Fly”; Cheryl Medow’s “Yellow-billed Stork Strolling”; Carolyn Monastra’s “’Baird’s Sparrow’ in a tree in a cemetery”; Mary Reeve’s “Pursuing Contrast,” with what look to be a crow and swan (the contrast being both in size and color); and Terri Unger’s “Joe & Susie,” which shows a cockatiel on a man’s shoulder.
Joe has his back turned to the camera. That motif also appears in Jeff Larason’s ”South Station Preacher,” Anastasia Sierra’s “Shadows,” Preston Gannaway’s “EJ sleeping,” and Leslie Twitchell’s “Summerself.”
A turned back can be construed as a form of concealment. Concealment as a condition figures in Gail Samuelson’s “Tensile” (blurred background); Anne Walker’s “Threshold” (occluded by mist); Donna Cooper’s “In the Fog”; and Susan Keiser’s “Barbaric Glass No. 5116” (dolls seen behind glass covered with water beads). In the inviting landscape Celia Lara photographed for “Riverside,” an earth mover in the distant background may not be concealed but it’s easy to miss. Of course concealment is as concealment does. A wind-blown curtain in Nancy Roberts’s “The Breeze” covers the face of a woman who is otherwise nude.
The face painted on a facade in Cynthia Smith’s “Drawn Curtain” is partly concealed. What’s more notable, though, is her stare. Watching, if not quite staring, also features in Judi Iranyi’s charmingly wry “My mother and I” and Vanessa R. Thompson’s arrestingly spooky “Watchers.”
You don’t like watching? How about floating — or at least its appearance. A branch seems to do so in Janet Smith’s “Floating Home,” as does a book in Julia Cluett’s “December 6.” Scissors seem to float in the sky in Li Shen’s “Cutbacks.” It vies for most amusing title with Alison Lake’s “Engulfed Lamp, Montreal, Canada” — the engulfment taking the form of shrubbery.
Montreal is one of several specific locations or sites mentioned in the show. In addition to Larason’s South Station, they include Thomas Winter’s “Snow Rivulet. Tioga Pass, Yosemite,” Susan Lirakis’s striking “Chocorua, January,” Donna Gordon’s “Kendra, Near Mt. Monadnock, NH,” Lali Khalid’s “From Lahore to Lake Superior” (a geography of the imagination), Alan Wagner’s “Washington Monument Protest Raised Fist/Finger” (it shows just what the title says), and Becky Field’s radiant “Our Future Leaders: Liberian Boy in Manchester, NH.” That title, if you ponder it, is even more political than Wagner’s.
Obviously, Robin Bailey’s “3941 Jacob Street — Wheeling, WV” presents a place. It also evokes a mood, that mood being very Edward Hopper. Art as inspiration — or allusion or genre reference — recurs throughout the show. Steve Goldband & Ellen Konar’s “Encroaching” would make Helen Frankenthaler do a happy double take. “Wax Beans with Eggs and Potatoes,” Astrid Reischwitz’s lustrous homage to 17th-century Spanish still life, contends for most appetizing title with Yelena Zhavoronkova’s masterfully delicate “Aftertaste. Turmeric.”
Fruma Markowitz’s cyanotype collage “Hilloulah to the West and to the East” is like a stained-glass frieze. Suzanne Theodora White’s “The Drought” takes a Cubist approach to its sumptuous picture planes. Jeff Sass’s “Ascending” is very painterly in its own shuffling of picture planes.
The art-oriented photographs tend not to draw on photography. Exceptions include Lee Rogers’ “Tranquillity #4,” which recalls Albert Renger-Patzsch; and, in the online show, Wanda Habenicht’s “Diptych # 86 (Phase II)” is very Saul Leiter (that’s a compliment). Susan Keiser’s dolls nod to Laurie Simmons. Winter’s Yosemite photograph brings to mind Ansel Adams, as does (less directly) Charlotte Niel’s “Unnatural Study #21,” which sure looks like a repurposed Yosemite.
Adams, along with such forebears as Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, and William Henry Jackson brings us to Alina Saranti. Those photographers were all male. For “Far From,” Saranti has taken her own black-and-white photographs of the Western sublime and stitched in lines of embroidery, marrying a traditionally “masculine” genre to a traditionally “feminine” one.
The effect of the stitching isn’t just subversive conceptually. It’s also subversive tactilely — photographs, unlike thread, aren’t meant to be touched (that’s why they’re displayed under glass). It’s also subversive visually. When red, the thread harkens to blood, when white to lightning, and so on. The West with color added is very different from the West in black and white.
Subversive is too weak a word for what André Ramos-Woodard wants to do with “BLACK SNAFU.” “I appropriate various depictions of Black people that I find throughout the history of cartooning,” Ramos-Woodard writes, “and juxtapose them with photographs that celebrate and line up more authentically with my Black experience.”
The results are energetic, assertive, a bit garish, and not exactly nuanced, though nuance isn’t the point when dealing with cultural markers like Aunt Jemima, fried chicken, and watermelon.
The Griffin’s 15th annual photobook exhibition has 45 volumes in it. For the first time, there’s also an exhibition of handmade photobooks, with 20 volumes. Browsing is encouraged.
At the very least, savor some of the titles: Andrew MK Warren’s “Yes Jazz Cactus” (the lack of commas is an excellent touch), Lucia Ravens’s “Flower Feed Flourish” (try saying that five times fast), Marcia Ciro’s “Atonement — River of,” Johnna Arnold’s “To Untangle a Knot with One Hand,” Candace diCarlo’s “Quelques photos de le salle d’attente” (in English, “Photographs from the Waiting Room”), and William Harting’s “Merde” (a title better left untranslated).
31st ANNUAL JURIED MEMBERS’ EXHIBITION
ALINA SARANTI: FAR FROM
ANDRÉ RAMOS WOODWARD: BLACK SNAFU
At Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, through Aug. 17 (“Members Exhibition” and “Far From”) and Sept. 28 (“BLACK SNAFU”). 781-729-1158, griffinmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.