Whirled view
Roger Vail's dizzying images follow paths of light in motion
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

As a child growing up in Chicago, photographer Roger Vail was fascinated by carnivals. As he haunted amusement parks, filling his eyes with the delight of colored lights attached to huge machines moving in eccentric paths, he was an awestruck wanderer in a garden of unearthly lights. That sense of wonder pervades his new color photographs at JayJay.

Vail - who has taught photography in the art department at California State University, Sacramento, since 1970 - is a nationally known artist whose photo graphs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, among others. Long interested in tracing the path of light in his photographs, he has turned to carnival rides as a subject twice before - in a series of black-and-white photographs taken in 1970 and a group of platinum prints made in the mid-1990s. His current series, titled "Spin Out," is his first work in color.

"You find the widest spectrum of colors in carnivals" Vail said at the gallery. "I have always loved carnival rides, which inspire me to get into the spirit of fun with my eyes. They are one of the best uses of machinery ever invented."

Improved digital technology, said Vail, prompted his move into color. Using 8-by-10-inch transparencies, scanned and printed digitally with light jet technology, he is able to capture minute detail in nighttime photos that trace the movement of light during three-minute exposures. The rich, large format prints, Vail said, are not manipulated or computer-enhanced. Shot over a two-year period at California carnivals, the images are printed on chromogenic color photographic paper that is stable for 60 years.

Vail's earlier carnival photos had a kind of film noir quality, a dark, eerie, macabre feeling that gave the viewer a sense of frisson. In contrast, his color shots capture the hectic, feverish frivolity of amusement parks, turning the rides into strange organic beings that might exist in the far reaches of the cosmos or on a cellular, even subatomic, level.

"Spin Out," the title image, might be a giant star exploding in the far reaches of outer space or an amorphous, gelatinous, phosphorescent creature seen under a microscope. Only the bosomy superwomen painted on the ride's base root it in the here and now of a tawdry pop-culture world.

"I think of these images as painting with light," Vail said "It's exciting because I never know what they will look like until I develop them."

Certainly, some of the images resemble abstract paintings, the richness of detail giving them an almost three-dimensional quality. The moving lights, following the paths of rides that move up and down and side ways simultaneously, form patterns that make your head spin just as surely as do the rides themselves. Just the names of some of the machines - Yoyo, Zipper, Octopus - are enough to make you queasy, but following the swerving, swirling, plunging, spinning lines of the lights really gives you pause. Vail admitted that he doesn't go on the rides; he just likes to look.

An interesting human element comes into several of the photos, as people moving in front of the rides become ghostly eminences. Al the ground level of the unearthly creature formed by a ride named "Evolution," half-formed humans move in and out of existence, poised between being and nothingness, providing an ironic twist to the name of the ride and the concept it denotes.

People are present, too, Iike the shadows seen from Plato's cave, at the base of the miraculous "Inverter," an image that might be a drawing made by a Spirograph or a scientific illustration of subatomic movement, squaring the bright bull's-eye of a moving Ferris wheel. In another image of a giant Ferris wheel and its bleeding reflection in a pool below, people sit on a jetty waiting for fireworks to begin in a haunted scene in which you can almost smell the air of a soft summer night.

Vail is especially adept at capturing the gradations and shifting colors of the night sky. "Wave Swinger" gives us an eerie shot of a form that resembles a red mushroom cloud rising up against an electric-blue sky worthy of Maxfield Parrish. In "Wave Swinger II," the night sky has darkened to a deep indigo, setting off the delicate pink hues of the ride, which now resembles an exotic creature that might dwell deep in some tropical sea.

While most of the images focus on a man made universe of machinery and artificial lights, nature asserts itself in "Tree and Octopus," a stunning shot of the undulating, whip whipping movement of the Octopus ride, pitted against the twisted trunk and limbs of a cypress that rise up like tentacles to the side of the ride.

At its core, Vail's work is about the act of seeing. Great artists are people whose eyes are peeled, skinned so that they see things the rest of us miss. These photographs open our eyes to new worlds, ones we would never have seen without Vail's intercession. We have to be grateful for that.