Bruce Cratsley
'Master of Light and Shadow'
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park
Through Jan. 5
This sampling of two dozen photographs is a small one, but it confirms the thematic breadth and the emotional depth of this artist's work over 20 years.
Like the photographers he most admires, Atget and Lisette Model (with whom he studied), Bruce Cratsley often freezes images of apparently unpeopled urban or natural worlds: the fall of late-day light through a window of the Louvre; a cherry tree blooming on Cape Cod; fireworks bursting over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Each picture reveals the resonant, unsuspected glamour of a particular time and place, and this is true of photographs of human subjects as well. These may be ''portraits'' of sculptures in a museum or of friends at home. But in either case, the sitters, ideal or real, come across as both precious and vulnerable.
This is particularly evident in two images paired by the show's curator, Barbara Head Millstein. One is of an ancient Egyptian stone head, its surface chipped but its expression serene and noble. The other is of the shadowed figure of the photographer's lover lying in bed, his face marked by the ravages of AIDS (from which Mr. Cratsley himself suffers) but softened with a dreamy smile. Indeed, there is something dreamlike about all of this work. And whether Mr. Cratsley is setting up a surreal play of glinting reflective surfaces or picking his subjects out from velvety, penumbral darkness like jewels on a cushion, the combination of elegance and evanescence that results is his signature. HOLLAND COTTER