Luis Mallo (exhibition).

Ricco/Maresca Gallery, New York City 

In his homage to Walker Evans, Luis Mallo candidly photographs not the faces but the hands of passengers on the New York City subway. There are approximately fifty black-and-white images, each similar in composition: a vertical rectangle with the hands typically occupying the bottom third and the top edge arriving just at the base of the neck. All the subjects are seated, dressed in winter garb, with their hands - the only flesh visible - variously occupied: clutching objects or simply folded in the lap.

Any one of these images could stand on its own. Each is deftly printed so that the clothing forms a ground for the hands - a high-key ground for black skin and the reverse for white. Such contrasts convey a sense of ambient light far richer than the flat utilitarian illumination associated with the subway, and one is left with the impression that the subjects are somewhere special - church perhaps, or even a funeral parlous. The overall effect is to convey a sense of dignity and quietness, no mean feat given the actual setting.

The images are invariably presented in groups, either in horizontal rows or in larger grids. The latter are not wholly successful. In general, grids work best when relatively unimposing individual images are arranged so as to achieve a synergistic effect. Witness the work of the Bechers, in which numerous rather bland photographs of water towers or other such figures of industrial infrastructure are brought together to form highly energized and imposing grids. But in Mallo's work the individual images are too powerful for such treatment and their energy is dissipated, rather than augmented, by the grids. Still, the images do benefit from a certain amount of mutual reinforcement and the right balance is found in Mallo's horizontal rows. In one such row, the sequence of images conveys a sense of the passage of time, as a single pair of hands is repeatedly photographed in the process of knitting. But such looking beyond Evans to Muybridge's time-and-motion studies is the exception and timelessness is in fact what is best conveyed by Mallo's grouped images. For here the common denominator becomes the lack of visual clues which could date the images. Missing entirely are the walkmans, gameboys, virtual pets and other such in-hand gadgets that would place the subjects firmly in the 90s. In their place we find Bibles, purses of traditional design, black leather gloves and other relatively timeless objects. Tellingly, wristwatches appear, but all are of the traditional analogue variety and could as easily have been worn by Evans's subjects as by passengers of our day.

Indeed such is the timelessness of these images that they could be cropped portions of Evans's own negatives. And it is in this way that Mallo quietly, thoughtfully, powerfully and with due reverence to Evans, makes the case that we are the same people today, down there riding the trains, as Evans found in his own time.