Photographer Sharon Wickham has been making remarkable images for many years: still life, botanicals, found elements, people, and architecture. Animalier Electricite is her new series of prints displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art café gallery. Wickham says she was inspired by the Animalier School, where artists and sculptors, active in both Europe and America in the 19th and early 20th century, were more concerned with expressing the essence of their subjects—both wild and domesticated animals—than with rendering them in all their realistic detail. So in this spirit, her large format photographs are not conventional portraits, but are animals in motion.

Wickham hones in on the essential nature of her subjects: the movement of breath, skin, bones, and muscles. She is interested in the nature of existence itself, thus the images not only refer to life, but also to death and push the boundaries between the physical and the non-physical worlds. Between the tangible and the intangible, these are portraits of motion itself, and display an almost painterly gesture that points to a “not knowing”—to a dislocation in time and space—that which constitutes the mysterious nature of all living things.

Wickham is further influenced by her study of Buddhist philosophy. Her methods bring to mind the words of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn:

Mindfulness is the observing mind, but it does not stand outside of the object of observation. It goes right into the object and becomes one with it. Because the nature of the observing mind is mindfulness, the observing mind does not lose itself in the object but transforms it by illuminating it, just as the penetrating light of the sun transforms trees and plants.

Looking at Sharon Wickham’s images reminded me of American photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s early studies of a trotting horse. In her book “River Of Shadows” about Eadweard Muybridge, Rebecca Solnit notes that he was a pioneer in high-speed motion photography. His technological wizardry, using fast motion shutters, captured the speed and dynamism of the times, which were redefined by cross continental trains and the telegraph in the mid-to-late 1800’s. In our day, the internet and digital images have profoundly affected how we perceive reality. With her use of digital photography, Sharon Wickham, prefigured by Muybridge, shows us how elastic the idea of time and space really is, and the constantly changing nature of perception.

Animalier Electricite will be on view through September 3rd, 2007.