What Critics and Curators Have Said:

“Mary Lang offers some startling, lovely photographs….A black and white photo shot in Auburndale shows speckles of snow on a frozen ground, with patterns of sunlight flitting over them. It’s delectable; the rhythm of light played against the rhythm of white on dark makes this small photo into a thrilling little dance…That moment of quiet followed by a sparked imagination touches on the sacred.” --Cate McQuaid, Arts Critic, The Boston Globe

“In addition to constructing reality, photography often captures those interstitial moments of reverie between periods of cognizance. Due to its inherent grounding in the real world, a photograph has an enhanced ability to draw the viewer into this parallel dream world, simulating that childlike state of mind when the wall between the imagination and reality is very thin indeed. The selection of pictures chosen for Wonderland is composed of images that transport the viewer beyond the immediate where, as in our dreams, we find both nightmare and delight.” ---Yancey Richardson, Yancey Richardson Gallery

“Mary Lang’s black and white photographs of children are reminiscent of Sally Mann’s: Both women present their subjects without gooey sentiment. Lang shows her protagonists in their own world, sharing games and secrets that adults can only guess at. The marvel of her work is that the children seem utterly unconscious of her intrusion.” ----Christine Temin, Arts Critic, The Boston Globe

“Her true and telling photographs of the inner and private world of children reveal no hint that the young are aware of the intrusive, recording eye. I don’t know how she does it. ‘Home from School, 1990’ pictures a little troop of bookbag-luggers, each carrying three or four stalks and switches gathered on the trek home. There is no clue as to the attraction nor the imagined use of these botanic wands, and we are left infused with nostalgia and wonderment, trying to remember how it was.” ------Marty Carlock, critic/columnist, Harte-Hanks Newspapers

“Your photographs… made excellent additions to the Fogg’s collection of contemporary American photography of the domestic sphere. I am particularly impressed with the manner in which your photographs are at once compelling vignettes, intelligently expanding the distance between adult and child perceptions of the surrounding environment (fantasy, imagination, mystery, cruelty), and are complex visual constructions which employ inventive formal strategies invigorating the larger meaning of the picture.” ---Deborah Martin Kao, Curator of Photographs, Harvard University Art Museums

“These pictures are part of a broader trend in American photography to seek not the grand and distant but rather the nearby and familiar. Unlike many formalist photographers working around the 1970s, whose pictures seemed often to mock middle-class existence, Lang and her generation of photographers have looked around themselves with greater compassion and sympathy, finding in the ordinary cause not for disgust but rather for attentive and conscious reflection.” --- John Pultz, Curator of Photography, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas at Lawrence