George Tatge. Presenze. Presences. Paesaggi italiani. Italian Landscapes

George Tatge's photographs are apparitional.They re-vision the objects he selects and that selection, the photographer's syntax, is at once classical and idiosyncratic, their often hieratic compositional order ruptured by surprise.A craggy rock in the foreground of a hillside balances its weight against the silhouette of a tree against the horizon above, and between them, they register mineral versus organic, two essential aspects of nature's infinity. To photograph nature in the twenty-first century is especially difficult. Tatge, like so many Americans over a hundred years before him, has been seduced by Italy as subject, and contrived to register a magic that has endured in a land where Henry James found "ancient things made sweet by their age... with Nature helping Time, very much as a tender, sunwearied, ingenuous sister waits upon a brother, heavy of limb and dim of sight, who sits with his back against a sun-warmed wall". (Barbara Novak)