Divergent Viewfinders Jeffrey Keith Schreiber And Sean Justice Take Different RoadsIn Landscape Photography. By Margaret Regan A NEW INVITATIONAL show at Dinnerware travels the divergent roads taken by two local photographers: Jeffrey Keith Schreiber, who roamed the Alaska back country to capture monumental images of wilderness, and Sean Justice, who trawled through manicured Korea in search of childhood memories. Though miles apart in technique and tone, the photographic results of this pair's separate meditative journeys share some traits. The pictures are black and white, they're relatively small and they emphasize the spiritual qualities of nature. And, interestingly, each photographer offers an homage to an older art-historical tradition. Justice's tiny pictures, full of crooked black tree branches and curving hills, honor the delicate ink painting and calligraphy practiced in Asia. Schreiber's long views of Alaska's snow-capped peaks and sprawling valleys are firmly in the tradition of Western landscape photography, perfected by the wandering-explorer photographers of the 19th century. His Alaska is mostly devoid of human presence, a pristine land that readily embodies the 19th-century insistence on finding the "sublime" in nature. He's even called the series of 28 pictures Elementary Spirits. Schreiber, who works at the Center for Creative Photography, also uses an old-fashioned technique: palladium printing, which has been coming back into vogue of late. Palladium (or platinum) prints were first used toward the end of the 19th century, and later perfected by such photographic luminaries as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Irving Penn. Prized for their broad range of gray tones and for their manufacture by hand, palladium prints are more expensive and more complicated to make than the more common gelatin silver print. The photographer has to lug around a large camera because palladium prints are "contact printed": the size of the negative equals the size of the final print. In the darkroom, the paper is coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, and the negative placed directly on it. Working almost exclusively in the 8-by-10-inch size, Schreiber uses palladium's rich scale of grays to make subtle pictures that look old and faded. There are few dark darks or bright whites to interrupt the elegiac quality of these softly muted pictures of undefiled nature. "Sukakpak Mountain" is a classic vision of a white-capped Alaska peak jutting up from a sea of pines, the typically long shadow of the West coming in from the lower right. But the sky is a soft, flat gray, the snow's white is subdued, even the dark shadow is muffled. There may be a subtext to Schreiber's apparent mournfulness: Alaska is the last American wilderness, and it's under threat by oil and logging interests with powerful political connections. In his pictures, it's almost as if its pristine beauty is already a thing of the past. The pictures may be quiet, but Schreiber nevertheless delights in trying the standard monumental views, turning his camera vertically for "Little Susitna 1," a shot of a mountain under a cloudy sky, with water and rocks meandering into the foreground, and horizontally for "Denali," another snow-capped extravaganza. In only one of these big landscapes, "Talkeetna," do we find any evidence of human presence: ramshackle cabins, perhaps belonging to long-ago miners, nestled under a horizontal row of rugged peaks. The opposite numbers of these sprawling scenes are Schreiber's detailed close-ups. Palladium prints are eminently suited to these still lifes found in nature, capturing in great detail the crisp blades of grass in "Koyukuk," the textured rocks in "Little Susitna River." And in one surprising picture, "Eagle," Schreiber breaks all his own rules for the Alaska series. It's a gorgeous near-abstraction of jagged broken glass and circular metal tools, its dark and light spaces criss-crossed by the grid of a window frame. Focusing wholly on what humans have left behind, this one suggests a bleak memory of the past. Memory Fragments is the name Justice has given his suite of 17 gelatin silver prints, some of which were seen several seasons ago at Central Arts Collective. A freelancer who works for the Tucson Weekly among other local clients, Justice in 1993 revisited the scenes of his boyhood in Korea, where his father was a Peace Corps administrator in the '60s. If Schreiber's forays into Alaska suggest a memory of what may no longer exist in the future, Justice's pictures are tiny views into the past, into his own memories of childhood. Justice's pictures, measured in just a few inches, don't track down familiar faces or haunts, though. What Justice is after are more archtypal images of the Korea that remains in his mind: spare pictures of sacred places and cultivated hills, black trees posed against a white sky, tiny human figures coming over a horizon. Modeled as they are on Korean ink painting, these pictures are a starker black and white than Schreiber's across the way. The lovely "Pine #3, Kyungju, Korea" is typical. In it, a neatly pruned tree grows alone, one curved hill below it, another above. Its spaces are carefully divided into planes that shift from dark to light, the tree a piece of black calligraphy scrawled on the hills. Photographs by Jeffrey Keith Schreiber and Sean Justice continues through September 7 at Dinnerware Contemporary Art Gallery, 135 E. Congress St. An artists' slide discussion will be at 5 p.m. Friday, September 6, followed by a closing reception from 7 to 9 p.m. Regular gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 7 to 9 p.m. on Downtown Saturday Nights. For more information call 792-4503.

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