Galleries: 'Off Camera' spotlights photos used in unconventional ways

Sometimes a photograph can improve a painting - or a drawing, or a collage, or a sculpture. Such was often the case with the work of the homeless Chicago street artist Lee Godie, whose more amateurish paintings of people and flowers became exponentially more intriguing when she pasted a black-and-white photo of herself in a corner of a canvas (likewise, her photographs of herself were improved by her whimsical drawn flourishes atop them).

Or, sometimes an unbelievably hapless photograph can transcend expectations of its medium. Some might say that Miroslav Tichy, a Czech who trained his homemade camera on women (most of them strangely unaware they were being stalked by the creepy, long-bearded Tichy) from the 1960s to 1985 in his hometown of Kyjov, accomplished just that in his intentionally badly printed but perhaps ultimately poetic works of art. If nothing else, Tichy apparently had a strategy. "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world," he remarked in a 1994 documentary film about himself.

Godie, who died in 1994, and Tichy, now in his 80s, are just two of the 17 artists in Fleisher/Ollman Gallery's fascinating "Off Camera," an exhibition of works that make use of the photograph in unconventional ways, whether manipulated and presented by itself or incorporated as an element in a work of a different medium.

Much of this work is simultaneously simple and haunting. Sebastiaan Bremer drips droplets of acrylic paint and ink of various colors onto newly printed vintage color photographs of himself and his family, the effect of which brings to mind falling snow, tears, spilled blood, and the mold that destroys beloved old photographs. Oliver Herring alters what appear to be found photographs by applying cut metallic photo paper to them. In one work, he created a steel "mask" over a woman's face and inserted a large metal "knife" into her hand; in another, he arranged a copper "helmet" on a boy's head. Amelie von Wolfen's swirling, expressionistic abstract paintings on cut paper seem to emanate from a photograph positioned in the middle of these painted areas, showing an old desk and chair in an otherwise empty room that seems pointedly drained of atmosphere. You wonder what took place there.

Sculpture and the photograph make for an awkward pairing in this show, but with such intentional (and successful) flat-footed verve that I was won over. Virginia Poundstone's bent-metal sculptures printed with digital photographs of landscapes made me think of an imaginary dialogue between sculptor John Chamberlain and photographer Stephen Shore (and the sculpture mounted on a base of colored urethane that puddled at the bottom brought sculptor Franz West into the conversation). Letha Wilson's Concrete Snowbank (2011), a photograph of a voluptuously snow-covered yard intersected by a half-moon of poured concrete, was fresh in every sense of the word.

Godie and Tichy aren't the only eccentrics here, by any means. One of the show's best-known artists, May Wilson, who died in 1986, is represented by several photo collages from her "Ridiculous Portrait" series, in which she pasted cutout photo-booth images of her own mugging face over those of figures on postcards, Old-Master reproductions, and images from soft-porn magazines. Joe "40,000" Murphy, not a trained artist but an usher for celebrities in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, obsessively cut and pasted images of his family and himself into publicity stills, newspaper photographs, and other ephemera.

You leave "Off Camera" with the impression of the photograph as an object as much as an image - and a treasured vintage one at that - and of the malleability of all mediums.

There are more than a few supremely elegant abstract paintings in John Zinsser's show at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, not least among them

(A) Glimmer Coming

(2010), of matte violet paint manipulated on a black field in patterns reminiscent of Warhol's camouflage paintings, and his Ryman-influenced

Toward Attention (2010)

, of thick, matte gray squiggles on a matte brown field.

But the Brooklyn painter and writer stands out even more here for his fastidiously rendered colored-pencil and graphite facsimiles of pages from Christie's and Sotheby's catalogs, among them dead-on replicas of paintings by Frank Stella, Brice Marden, and Jean-Michel Basquiat and their accompanying typewritten descriptions. They're a guilty pleasure, seductive and fun.

Mauro Zamora, a Philadelphia-based artist, has a strong one-person show at Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art, of paintings that portend social and ecological disasters, the most recent of which seem to have been propelled by the events of the BP oil spill.

Blowout Preventer (2010) shows a broken pipe form amid scaffolding; in Rubber Necker, a plume of fluorescent orange rises from a hole surrounded by scaffolding; T.A.R.P (2009) depicts blue tarps over scaffolding. None of these images are as literal as they sound - in fact, they're almost abstract - but they communicate chaos and raw emotion within carefully considered compositions.