Photos Turn City Inside Out

Balconies bathed in dark light under a red sky. A pale streetlight in a neon atmosphere. A window flashing yellow under an angled roof and a black cloud. These are among the images in Tom Peterson’s ​“Dreamscapes,” a series of photographs that take over City Gallery on Upper State Street until March 29, with an opening reception on March 12.

Peterson, a documentary and fine art photographer, employs two simple ideas to create his images. First, he has a way of taking pictures of a fragment of a building in such a way as to dislocate the viewer somewhat. There are no landmarks in the pictures, or human figures, that help us find our bearings. Second, he manipulates the color so that a bright blue sky becomes a sullen red. A dark window becomes a blaze of color.

“‘Dreamscapes’ began as a I imagined a world turned inside out,” Peterson writes in an accompanying statement. ​“After several unsatisfactory efforts, I hit upon the reversal of digital images to create bold, dramatic color. The results represent a voyage from the everyday into the stillness and strangeness of a landscape at once familiar and otherworldly.”

Peterson’s transformations work from a purely aesthetic perspective. Because the subjects of the photos are so often the geometric forms and straight lines of modern architecture, it’s possible to imagine that the places don’t exist at all — that they’re all drawn and colored entirely in an illustration program.

Some of the images in ​“Dreamscapes” even work as abstract pieces, not as buildings or landscapes, but simply as shapes and colors. This is intentional. To Peterson, a Hamden resident, the images ​“provide an abstract view of every day structures we often pass by, but rarely notice,” he explains in a statement on his website.

But there’s more going on than simply abstraction. ​“Dreamscapes” and other images Peterson has taken ​“are part of an ongoing series of photographs taken from weekly walking tours,” he explains. ​“Since 2005, I have passionately dedicated myself to documenting Connecticut’s urban centers. I generally find places that are in a state of change and return to them often. The more I return, the more I see…. I see my photographs as a bridge for future generations to view our present everyday culture and surroundings.”

In this context, Peterson’s focus on new architecture feels like a message. Many of Connecticut’s urban centers, after all, are not new, and the older buildings are likely to be the cities’ landmarks. Taking a picture of the state capitol building locates you immediately in Hartford, just as taking a picture of the older buildings along, say, Chapel Street, puts you right in New Haven. The buildings with history carry their wider sense of place with them. By contrast, the new construction that Peterson documents could be in any of the newer developments in the state. Peterson’s abstractions locate us anywhere, and in another sense, nowhere.

Peterson’s dreamscapes thus resonate with other exhibits in town, like ​“Factory” at the New Haven Museum, that touch on the way that the new construction in New Haven might affect its culture. New Haven is a place with a long and deep history, and it’s not just about the New Haven Green and its churches, or the old factory buildings that used to house the industrial powerhouses that played such a large role in the city’s story. It’s in the daily architecture of people’s houses and apartments, from the Hill to Wooster Square to Newhallville to East Rock. It’s now routinely agreed that New Haven’s urban renewal efforts in the second half of the 20th century went too far, that too much of the fabric of the city’s old neighborhoods were lost in the name of progress. The development currently happening in the city is nowhere near on the same scale, and is certainly not the coordinated effort that urban renewal was. But transformations happen block by block, building by building, apartment by apartment, too. If the newest buildings in New Haven really do look like they could be in any other Connecticut city — or any city within several hundred miles — then where are we really? Just as you might ask yourself in the middle of a dream, when your surroundings suddenly shift around you, what is really going on here?

“Dreamscapes” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through March 29. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.