Photography, like post-modern art in general, became highly splintered in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries and is now largely dominated by work that is "imagined", staged, borrowed, appropriated, manipulated and self-referential. The camera as "truth teller" is now highly suspect. Posing, retouching, staging and reenacting for the camera date back to the 19th century. With such a long history, fabrication has become so commonplace that today's viewer is just as likely to reject as accept the "truthfulness" of any photograph he sees. It is against this backdrop that Alan Strassman's work provides a fresh look at old values.

Strassman's work is not difficult to place visually. Think "Walker Evans Meets Aaron Siskind in Living Color". In much of Siskind's work and in Evans's lesser known work, we see artists who, just as Edward Weston before them, were deliberately synthesizing realism, abstraction and straight photography. Evans, Siskind and a few others like Minor White cast a steady, realistic gaze on the world around them, finding dignity, drama and humanity in subject matter where others did not even think to look. They were important forerunners of many later 20^th and 21^st century photographers like Strassman and William Eggleston who endow the familiar and the commonplace with monumentality.

Strassman's images, an intersection of straight photography with abstract photography, give life to what he sees, not what he imagines. Many of the photographs merge past and present to evoke a sense of weary nostalgia rooted in an unflinching immediate reality. While the subject matter is ordinary, it is often ambiguous, defying easy identification or labels. He employs abstraction in the classic sense - he uses part of a whole to represent something other than the thing itself.

A throwback to an earlier time, Strassman composes in the viewfinder and uses the computer like a traditional wet dark room. Consequently, he enters the digital darkroom to make adjustments of exposure, contrast and color balance in order to more closely approximate what the human eye can see but he rejects the sort of image manipulation for which Photoshop has become notorious.