In our oversaturated, hyper sharpened, digital color world where most photographers are chasing the latest digital camera with the most mega pixels, Brian Lav is still using the same tools he has been using for forty years. He chooses to shoot with a view camera on black and white film– a language that can speak more directly to the essence of a photograph. He remembers what Edward Weston wrote about the value of “learning to see in terms of the field of one lens, the scale of one film and one paper” and he has remained true. How delightfully anachronistic.

What he chooses to look at is usually close to home. He explores his immediate surroundings and photographs the commonplace: a window, a sofa, trees, a Dairy Queen at night. But because he has such extraordinary control of his medium, the images are anything but common. He carefully balances the angles, lines and forms critical to the clarity of photographic expression and transforms the ordinary into a quixotic tableau that pulsates with nuance, emotion and sometimes mystery. He has so mastered how to see photographically in black and white, that his images resonate with depth and detail, and lush shadows and middle tones that seem to stretch forever.

If a photographer stamps his photographs with his sensibility, then what do we learn about Lav by looking at his photographs? His process requires control and a meticulous attention to detail, yet his image of shadows playing on the side of the church is whimsical. His photographs are still, suggesting that he is contemplative, yet they pulsate with an energy that exists just below the surface. They suggest a narrative in that space that occurs just before or just after the instant he photographs. Lav doesn’t construct reality because he doesn’t have to. His photographs are simultaneously contemporary and traditional. They possess a timelessness and a familiarity that compels us to