Kenneth Baker

Pictures of catastrophe at Koch: Pictures of devastation, like those of Larry Schwarm and Debbie Fleming Caffery at Koch, put their viewers on the spot.

Do they mean to test our sense of solidarity with distant strangers? Do they seek admiration, some action on our part or merely confrontation?

The pictures do all these things, but they cannot display the photographers' personal connections to their subjects.

Schwarm grew up outside Greensburg, Kan., and entered the town with his camera just hours after a tornado had ripped it apart in early May.

The sites of ruin he found have the perverse freshness of an undisturbed crime scene.

A visitor who goes directly to Koch from Jeff Wall's retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will irresistibly think of Wall's "The Destroyed Room" (1978) while looking at Schwarm's "Kyle's Bedroom, one-half mile south of Greensburg, Kansas, May 5, 2007."

Schwarm's picture inverts key aspects of Wall's. Where Wall presents in a light box a view of a fictitious room deliberately crammed with busted-up household items, Schwarm presents a color print shot within a real room voided of its contents by a natural disaster.

Yet both pictures question our capacity to respond to what we see in them with true feelings, other than surprise. Schwarm does it partly through a viewpoint that sights a relatively undisturbed-looking view through a missing window, adjacent a torn-away wall that opens onto a mass of debris.

What we might call the surrealism of disaster haunts many of these images: a bedroom with ceiling and roof torn off and an intact window, a roofless motel room where a framed picture, a mirror and the open sky sort into disparate levels of reality and the tornado appears to have lifted a TV set from its wall bracket and set it on a chest, its screen unbroken.

Similar ironies occur in Caffery's pictures of her native Louisiana, post-Katrina, as in "Jesus at Devastated Holly Beach, Holly Beach, Louisiana, October 2005" (2006), where a religious statue seems more than ordinarily concerned - and inert - overlooking a disheveled landscape.

Intensifying common concern with omens of global warming pulses somewhere behind these pictures. But the violence, shock and helplessness they describe refer us obliquely to that least natural of disasters - and the most carefully image-managed - the invasion and occupation of Iraq.