More Haunting Images From ‘Psycho’s’ Cinematographer

Exhibited simultaneously at Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies and Track 16 Gallery, Christopher Doyle’s photographs and photo-collages provide a sensual feast for the eyes, or little more than eye-candy, depending on how you look at them.

Doyle, an Australian-born, Hong Kong-based cinematographer, has been lauded for his envelope-pushing work on films like “Days of Being Wild,” “Chungking Express,” “Temptress Moon” and Gus Van Sant’s new “Psycho” remake. Co-curated by LACPS director Tania Martinez-Lemke and Roger Trilling, and timed conveniently to coincide with the release of “Psycho,” this sprawling survey is the first North American exhibition of Doyle’s photographs and collages (a Doyle film retrospective was screened at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater several weeks ago).

Doyle’s adventurous and exuberantly ad hoc approach to cinematography has earned him a well-deserved cult following among cineastes and film professionals alike. His guiding credo is that a film’s cinematography should be neither seamless nor invisible, but should instead leap out at the viewer with an expressive content of its own.

Doyle takes a similar approach to the color-drenched, hyperkinetic collage photographs in “A Cloud in Trousers,” the show on view at Track 16. In these mostly nonrepresentational works, Doyle cuts or rips his images apart and re-photographs the various pieces in striking new combinations. Doyle’s affinity for collage is also evident in his “straight” photographs, where he fills the frame with clashing colors, reflective surfaces and colliding planes of light, pattern and texture, sometimes collapsing foreground and background spaces so that they look as if they’re pressed up against one another.

Doyle also manipulates the film development process, achieving extraordinarily vibrant color effects: blood reds, electric blues and acidic yellows and greens that make the people in his shots look as if they exist in a heightened, otherworldly dimension. Doyle rarely shoots anything straight on; instead, he shoots his subjects at off-kilter camera angles or dramatically distorts the perspective.

Although Doyle’s images are impossible to ignore, after a while you begin to notice that there’s not much of substance behind the layers of ultra-hip surface allure. His photographs are undeniably evocative, but they are rarely provocative. Perhaps this is due to the fact that so many of his photographs have been taken on movie sets, where the layers of constructed reality seem to endlessly unfold, like two facing mirrors that reflect nothing more than the other’s reflection.

Doyle’s show at LACPS contains more of these high-concept film stills. An upper, attic-like room has been transformed into a decrepit, “Psycho”-inspired environment that displays photographs that were taken on the movie’s set. Created by Doyle, Van Sant and several set designers, the room contains several large work tables encrusted with bird droppings, a truly frightening stuffed owl suspended from a corner of the ceiling, and several musty shelves filled with taxidermy supplies, all of which served as furniture or props in the film. Van Sant’s photographs of stuffed birds and Doyle’s portraits of co-stars Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn hang from the walls or are scattered about the room. A few of Doyle’s color photocopies have even been torn up and stuffed inside a filthy toilet bowl.

Delightfully creepy as this installation is, it’s little more than a room-sized advertisement for “Psycho.” You can’t help but reflect upon Van Sant’s claim that his “shot-by-shot” remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece is supposed to be a work of conceptual art, a la Sherrie Levine’s appropriations of other artists’ work. By transplanting on-set photographs and actual movie props to an art context, Doyle and Van Sant have, in some ways, tried to copy their own copy. The absurd circularity of this enterprise may speak volumes about marketing chutzpah, but it certainly doesn’t add anything new or interesting to the discourse of conceptual art.

BE THERE

A reading and book signing with Christopher Doyle, Viggo Mortensen and Dennis Hopper will take place at Track 16 Gallery on Sunday at 7 p.m. Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, 6518 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 466-6232, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays. Track 16 Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., #C-1, Santa Monica, (310) 264-4678, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.