By Ryan Filchak

Robed in holy white, a high school color guard stands in formation behind a soccer goal. Relatives and supporters look from the bleachers at the marching band on the field. It feels hot. The print perspires. As with all images in Case Mahan’s exhibition “In the Round,” this scene is untitled, this place is nowhere, but for those familiar, we can hear the bleachers creak and the snare drums crack.

Taken over four years with pocketable cameras, Mahan’s photography uses place as the prompt, in this instance Lexington, KY, and little else. The subjects range from landscapes to portraits, animals to children, impersonal to intimate, a survey of small-town living. It is a simple idea on paper, but when one considers the long list of emotions (fear, curiosity, joy…) evoked by these black and white, right now, images on film, this direct and simple approach clears a path for a lovingly honest and complex, albeit abbreviated, personal history packed with mystery and tender nuance. As the exhibition text, written by Whitney Baker asserts, this is Lexington “live and liminal” and although Mahan’s subjects sometimes lack identification, they do not want for character.

Double exposed, interrupted by water and light, or the bug jar in your small hands, Mahan is getting your good side when you don’t suspect it. One such subject wears a tweed jacket, a rolled bandanna tied around his neck, an ink pen in the breast pocket, and with two hands, one on each side of the brim, he holds his hat in front of his face. Caught either during placement or removal, the viewer wonders if the gentleman knew he was photographed.

Despite the candor of the moment, this image shares a lineage with fellow Bluegrass- based cameraman Guy Mendes and his portrait from 1970 of a friend, shutterbug, and former Lexington Camera Club President Ralph Eugene Meatyard. In this instance, framed by a door open to the outside, the subject stands just beyond an abandoned farmhouse backdropped by trees and brush, his eyes closed, looking towards the sky, seemingly caught between heaven and hell, waiting for judgment. Geography and format aside, Mendes and Mahan are portraitists who convey a deeply trusting and familial respect for their subjects and demonstrate graceful hospitality through their archival observations.

When mentioning these men, there is the temptation to place Mahan in the seat of the heir apparent to a grand and traceable art history of picture takers Meatyard and Mendes represent, but that’s not fair to say. To engage in such pressured placement betrays the kindness shown in these images for small things, and quiet time with monumentally dense stories we will never truly understand. May this new chapter never end.

Case Mahan “In the Round” is on view through Sept. 14 at Institute 193, 215 N. Limestone St., Lexington, Kentucky.