John Pfahl at Janet Borden

Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Michael Klein

In his latest series of color photographs taken over the past three years, "Niagara Sublime," John Pfahl continues his quest to transcribe the forces of nature. Like Hokusai in his multiple 19th-century views of Mt. Fuji, this Buffalo native has turned his attention to the nearby Niagara Falls to document its many faces in a new series. Both natural wonders, Mt. Fuji and Niagara Falls have come to share the same fate as cultural icons that have lost some of their power to astonish us. When the French explorer Father Louis Hennepin discovered the cataract, he said "the universe does not afford its parallel." For Pfahl, the amazement is still there.

The title for the series was inspired by a poem "On Sublimity," by the young Alfred Lord Tennyson, written around 1824. Drawing upon Tennyson as well as other Romantic poets and writers for a lexicon of expressions of the Sublime, Pfahl underscores the purpose of his endeavor by titling his works the fiery descent, spectral vapors, the fatal brink or into the void. Pfahl emphasizes the nobility and inspiring character of his subject; within his usual near-square format, and working on a rather intimate scale (20 by 24 inches), Pfahl uses the camera to capture a large spectrum of images of the sometimes treacherous and sometimes hypnotic falls. Ironically, the closer one gets to the falls themselves the more abstract and elusive their substance becomes. Pfahl discovers and records, as if now scientist rather than artist, only air and mist and light.

Capturing aspects of the falls at different times of year, and under different weather conditions, as well as approaching them from varying vantage points, each of these pictures is a unique abstraction. Pfahl records the luminous colors reflected in snow and ice crystals, the refined and sculpted surface of water-beaten rock, the pattern of cirrus clouds and sun above the rushing waters. Pfahl has done for the falls what landscape painters had hoped to achieve over a century ago when American landscape painting was considered the apogee of transcendental thought, and photographers were merely meant to document the here and now. By means of his astute technique and formal efforts, he reaches beyond what is observed to make us meditate on the meaning of the scene. Never mind the continuing flood of photography today, it is noteworthy for someone to give himself over so completely to his subject matter, as opposed to creating a singular, synthetic style.