Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

Within the series are many of Arnold’s signature motifs: waves so wide and jagged, they look like mountains (The North Sea, Netherlands); crew members posing with fearsome sea creatures with glistening, gaping mouths (Willy and the Monkfish, North Sea, Scotland); and ravishing still lifes such as Beamer Catch, North Sea, Netherlands. That photo, with its spiny, big-lipped pink and brown fish lying on deck, soon to die in holding bins, is a visual orgy of detail: bubbles and blood, crabs and starfish, a Monet-like pastel tableau of gorgeous, impending doom. This hits upon the Freudian undertones in Arnold’s best work. The artist has a knack for transmuting photojournalism into metaphor.

Like all artists accorded the adjective “iconic,” Adams (1902-1984) is easy to view through a musty, sepia-tinted monocle—a trend that Ansel Adams: Photographs 1920s-1960s does much to dispel. Crisply matted and framed in immaculate white, the prints incorporate close-up and medium-shot imagery, not just the expansive vistas that made Adams famous. Even those wide panoramas—witness the transcendent Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park—come across in a different light.

In Eva Speer’s Landscaping, the painter continues her fascination with trompe l’oeil effects. Two works on paper mimic the play of light on bed linens, while seascape paintings show off her facility with photorealism. The most intriguing works, though, are a series of “How’d she do that?” abstractions that look like multicolored EKG readouts stacked one upon another. These dizzying, sumptuous works are among the strongest paintings shown in Portland this year.

Eva Speer is a versatile artist who uses paint to convey aspects of weight/levity, memory and a combination thereof.

Her work, a rare mix of aesthetic approaches, utilizes, but does not rely upon, the trope of what may seem photo real. But her subject matter in the current exhibition, “Landscaping," at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, is caught between tenuous worlds: real time, appropriation and complete fiction.

Each image in the Hartman show -- a mix of portraits and landscapes -- articulates a craftsman's considered touch and eye, from the click of the camera to the laborious hours Steinmetz undoubtedly spent in the darkroom. Those were hours well-spent: The light in many of these images is, to paraphrase from a past interview with Steinmetz in another publication, a revelatory force.

Women often appear fragmented, adrift and disembodied in the dreamlike collages of Toshiko Okanoue. The profile of a blond beauty tops a body composed of ballerina legs and playing cards in "Dance"; a swan and the bust of a brunette model shoot across the water in Leda in the Sea; and a bright, smiling glamour girl illuminates a dusky scene in Streetlamp.

Okanoue made these collages between 1950 and 1956, just after the devastation of World War II. Composed of photographs from Life and fashion magazines, the works feature dreamlike vistas and idiosyncratic humor in line with what was at the time a relatively new language for art. Surrealism hasn’t been in vogue for a while now, yet Okanoue’s output has a timeless sensibility—like an older, lesser-known cousin to contemporary collages, such as the notable output of Marnie Weber and Wangechi Mutu.

Included are nearly all of Link's iconic images of steam trains and small-town Americana, as pictured by an off-duty commercial photographer fascinated by railways and epic lighting scenarios. Link portrayed the dying steam train industry of the 1950s with the same unapologetic sentimentality he applied to small-town life. In image after image, locomotives barrel past fresh-faced teenagers and hardworking farmers, roll like clockwork through Edward Hopper-esque towns of sweet loneliness, and signify the promise of economic growth throughout the coal belt.

In capturing the private goings on of his subjects, Langer's pictures suggest the nudes of the Impressionist Edgar Degas, whose paintings of nude women engaged in their private daily rituals and habits had a voyeuristic clinicalness.

But Langer's pictures have a more benign quality to them. And, like Kenna, Langer strives deeply to achieve a cool formality. You're seeing a world in motion, but not a world moving naturally, and a world held at an emotional distance, too. It's a deliberately constructed world of shadow and mood.