Visual Arts
Eduardo Calderón: capturing life's magic realism

By Sheila Farr
Seattle Times art critic

EDUARDO CALDERON "Silvia," silver gelatin print by Eduardo Calderón, a native of Peru who studied anthropology and museology and takes photographs around the world.

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The magic realism of Eduardo Calderón's photographs doesn't come from tricks of processing or cropping. He gives us just what he sees on his ramblings in exotic places. The people in his black-and-white silver gelatin prints, on display at Photographic Center Northwest, seem to live someplace outside of time, haunted by ghosts.

He gets those mysterious overlays of imagery by shooting reflections, in water or glass, photographs within photographs.

It's sometimes impossible to untangle them and figure out what is real. The succinctly composed pictures are full of visual echoes.

Calderón, 55, works in a tradition of surrealism, but his version is found rather than artificially created. The scene in "Paro General" looks like the aftermath of some horrible carnage but turns out to be the broken bodies of dummies scattered inexplicably in the middle of a street, who knows where. In "Atelier," a man sits on a fence, next to a brick post, with what appears to be a large photographic print in front of him showing a repeat of the same scene.

Exhibit review Eduardo Calderón "Fotografías," ends Monday. 9 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, noon-9:30 p.m. Monday, Photographic Center Northwest, 900 12th Ave., Seattle (206-720-7222 or www.pcnw.org).

A native of Peru, Calderón studied anthropology at the University of Washington and museology at the Thomas Burke Memorial Museum at the UW. His photographs seem to further those studies and he has, in fact, worked on various projects in Central and South America as well as the Pacific Northwest documenting archaeological sites and the lives of Indian artists.

Even in his more personal work, Calderón shoots humans and their behavior as if they were a strange species observed in their habitat to be documented and cataloged.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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