Photographer Shoots For Tranquility

When he returned from a reception for his Neighborhood Walks exhibition back in 2015, photographer Tom Peterson experienced strange heart rhythms.

They turned out to be atrial fibrillation, which then led, shortly afterward, to a triple heart bypass.

Then in 2016, he had to deal with a carotid artery that wasn’t behaving.

It’s no wonder his new show — all white, calming minimalist photographs — is called ​“Solace.”

The show, which features an artist’s reception this coming Saturday and is at the cooperative City Gallery on upper State Street, runs through April 30.

Except for one female figure whose back and hat are colored red, all the works in the show are plucked from Peterson’s generally un-peopled street photography territory — building facades, doorways, windows (some interestingly broken), pipes, and porches.

Unlike his previous work in either dramatic black and white or color, the images are almost all blanched, bleached of color. And yet when you enter the modest, shoebox-shaped gallery, its own walls painted brightly white, Peterson’s images open up the pupil of the eye in an experience that is almost physical.

After a stage of adjustment, as you look, you do wonder through what veils — or shifts of visual info being processed through the optical nerve — we see the world. I think the result is generally good for the eye, and the heart.

“I wanted to create a space where at least I, or people could get away from everything,” Peterson said during a walk-through of the exhibition, which opened on Friday.

Some of the images, like the wind turbine near Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven, are recognizably from Peterson’s peregrinations in New Haven, Branford, and New London. Most have an anonymous quality.

He’s taken that quality and augmented it by removing the color a little at a time, and then in some instances returning color in carefully deployed touches or lines, but ultimately offering compositions that are as white as the gods of Photoshop and Peterson permit.

“The original idea was to start with the girl and then do less and less color” until he got to none at all, he explained.

However, the way the show is hung, with a line of red in one image that turns out to be a sliver of a door, or a leaf shape of blue or yellow on a spidery image, which turns out to be a broken window in New London, the experience of walking through feels surprising.

The last thing he wants, Peterson said, is to be hokey and create a visual experience that partakes of all of the gauzy and heavenly associations of whiteness. But he did want the experience to ​“go to a peaceful place.”

And he concedes that he would not have made the pictures had he not come out, at age 71, on the good side of his brushes with a pesky heart.

An optimistic and happy guy, who retired in 2003 and immediately picked up his Nikon D 600 (or its predecessors), Peterson said on some deep level he had always had the self-sense of a curious youngster. Although there is heart disease in his family, he said he genuinely had not given much thought to life’s natural end.

His heart troubles ​“made me think, realize that there’s going to be an end,” Peterson said. These pictures therefore become a kind of contemplation of both the here and the now, but also the Then.

Peterson said that each image took him hours and hours of looking to get it right, the levels of hue and saturation, months of ​“looking at them, seeing where their flaws are, it doesn’t come all of a sudden,” he said.

And he was delighted with the way the show has come out: untitled white images on white paper mounted on white foam board, which in turn are mounted on off-white generously bordered mats and each surrounded by an understated gray frame.

“I don’t see it as negative or depressing. I am a happy person,” he said.

And Peterson is charging forward with at least four more projects under way, he said: street photography, black and white architectural subjects, store fronts, and a series of color photographs in New York, as well as some black and white completely abstract compositions.

City Gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 4:00 p.m., with the opening reception on April 8 from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.