Photographer Steve Molnar knows quite a bit about places that most people wouldn't call their usual habitat. But through his pictures, having seen what he shows, we carry away a sense of being captured by the places just as he was.
Molnar is known for work that is journalistic, following his instincts and concerns for people who live in some remote places without much attention except from each other. But this go around, his sixth at San Francisco’s 60SIX, he offers a meditative survey of the Mojave Desert, begun twenty years ago and boasting strong lasting power as a revelation of richness in what initially might seem severely sparse.
Because the photographer is also an accomplished master printer chosen by other demanding photographers to render their work, it’s fair to call attention to the variety within his own set of 30 or so images on display. We get several distinctive ways of seeing, all anchored in a flair for making selected surface detail and graphic design equally significant in a way that makes the depictions not just economical but elegant.
Their effects come forth partly due to the sequencing and grouping established by the gallery’s owner and curator, mixing different kinds of views. The effect expresses the photographer’s own investment in exploring the environment with what I would call emotional generosity.
But for the purpose of this discussion, I’ll take some liberties, regrouping things to underline some specific thoughts about effects achieved by Molnar’s image craft.
Early on in my tour of the gallery, there were pictures with motion, lines and shapes in a design that helps one understand nature’s activity, like Amargosa Dunes No. 1 (below) and perhaps a masterpiece in the show, Kelso Dunes No. 3 (withheld here; come to the gallery - through February 6th, by appointment). These also quickly announce his use of graphical abstraction as a character in the location on par with any standing object.
And as if to press this notion even more, in images such as Desert Tracks Eureka Dunes or Mesquite Flat Dunes No. 1, he elevates the intrinsic abstractness of the desert expanse by making it the entire field of his picture, on which he places small etched figures that feel like drawing. This effectively converts the abstractness into the stillness of space punctuated over time.
The gallery notes tell us that Molnar shoots only in film and meticulously prints the work himself in gelatin silver format. Here in December of 2024, the availability of ultra-hi-res digital cameras argues definitively against any notion that film is categorically a more faithful medium of image capture. But what this note imparts is that when a photographer chooses a certain type of film, it is a critical aesthetic decision akin to choosing specific papers, inks, colors, and so on. Molnar’s choices are not specified, but that too is good: the “trade secrets” of his materials are like the prestidigitations behind his magic act. It’s simply more interesting to not know what they are than it is to know.
That takes us to the next observation, in which pictures like Kelso Dunes No. 4 or No. 6 hammer home that Molnar in general does terrific things to paper. You give him a piece, and it comes back like this:
Or this:
And now, we’re sensitized to much of the grounding in his other scenes, where more evidence of action moves the shots into the subject matter of life on these locations. Wind Erosion is a vigorous example:
The proliferation of objects almost immediately gives us a sense of where, vicariously, we stand in the location and draws us into it, but there is still some ambiguity about scale. This makes some of these pictures suspend us, the way two magnets at the right distance from each other can hold each other in place. We can choose to believe that we are either near or far away. But the unchanging picture itself actually sets us up for both decisions, simultaneously.
There are over 30 photographs on display, and careful juxtapositions established by curator Gwen Terpstra bring different views close together in an emphasis on Molnar’s versatility as an imagist in this desert setting. That heightens the emotional energy of participating in his exploration. In my visit, this settled into a kind of duality where his use of scale sometimes drove towards intimacy and sometimes towards spirituality. One does not need to choose between them, though; the tactile and the ethereal amplify each other.
That synergy is most pronounced with the numerous Pinnacles pictures, each offering monolithic, iconic figures against a blank sky, in postures that show them as surveyors and masters of all they see. Monumentality comes with dramatic size included, but these pictures argue that the vastness of the open space asks for something big enough to tame it. It means here that the hills and mountains seen in the background of many pictures have dutiful help from these “natives” for holding the desert in place. They're not just standing there; they're doing something.
But what about our place in it? By the time Molnar gets us close enough to really touch things, the scene has become a stage of things that look and feel like they are assuming gestures reflecting us to ourselves. And in what even counts as foreshadowing his sensibility in human documentary as well, the desert images begin to move into storytelling.
All images above: (c) Steve Molnar, courtesy 60Six.
Malcolm Ryder is a photographer and critic based in Oakland, CA where he also publishes for Oakland Art Murmur and is a board member there as well as at the East Bay Photo Collective (EBPCO). Info: malcolmryder.com/contact
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