Humans May Make Comeback

March 14, 2016, by Allan Appel - "For more than a decade David Ottenstein has been looping around the Midwest and the South before returning home to New Haven. Everywhere he makes disturbingly beautiful photographs of broken buildings, abandoned industrial sites, savaged farm land, the undersides of overpasses, real bridges or piers that seem like moody stage sets left behind after an evacuation, and other de-peopled landscapes of abandonment, where the human touch is felt primarily by its neglect or absence. Now the human beings are about to make a comeback. That assertion — that actual people may begin to pop up in future images — emerged as Ottenstein was the well-deserved center of attention at Night, a haunting new show of his work that opened to a throng at the DaSilva Gallery in Westville and continues through March 31. Artist Photo ARTIST PHOTO “Downey Grain Elevator.” Night — a decade’s retrospective of the Beaver Hills-based artist’s photographic travels — features 22 large-size archival pigment prints, mostly in black and white, taken in ten different states. They were taken with only available light and shot either in the darkness of night or at dusk. The show is thus a wonderfully dark tour of grain elevators, bridges, storefronts, museum facades, and ethanol plants, from ten different states across the country..."

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