Seiichi Furuya: Alive

A windswept beach at Okinawa, a burlesque show in Berlin, and shadows and light in Vienna all hold their place in this gathering of Furuya's wide-ranging photographic work. According to essayist Faber, Furuya's scattershot oeuvre is a reflection of his""constant compulsion to secure his individual existence through the photographic record,"" and the lack of unifying themes or conceits underscores a commitment to recording life in all its synaptic, disjointed wonder. Furuya's philosophy, Faber explains, is to let the scenes he encounters dictate his destiny, and not vice versa. The artist even declines to title his works (merely recording the city and year that they were taken) in order to recast them as experiences rather than creations. Whether any photographer can fully adhere to the role of neutral bystander is open to debate. Yet the images that Furuya records, the ones that capture his attention and motivate him to pop the shutter, limn the peripatetic life of an artist who is as attracted to the jarring as to the beautiful, to the desolate as to the sensual. The photographs leap among emotional octaves, a dizzying range intensified by Furuya's eye for dramatic composition. In fact, it appears that the decision to float freely among colors, styles and subjects may be the one constant element in Furuya's take on life.