Art: Mystery zone

The trees are magnificent in the images of Twin Cities photographer Ann Ginsburgh Hofkin. Centering the pictures, their lacy canopies merge with the sky while their branches arch over dappled meadows and gnarled roots burrowing deep into the Earth's crust.

At once monumental and delicate, Hofkin's trees have a primordial nobility that seems otherworldly. Do they really grow here, on this troubled planet?

Nine of Hofkin's luminous, black-and-white photos silently pose such questions at Nina Bliese Gallery in downtown Minneapolis through Nov. 11. Serene and still, the large-format photos -- some nearly 3 feet tall and 4 feet wide -- have a crystalline clarity that seems almost too perfect.

Yet Hofkin takes her pictures the old-fashioned way, loading film into a camera and hiking into the countryside, keeping her eyes tuned to that special play of light that makes a memorable image possible. She often returns to the same "very spiritual" landscapes -- sometimes even the same trees -- in Israel, Hawaii and along the California coast.

"I love being out in nature and coming upon a scene that grabs me and my heart," Hofkin said recently. "It might relate to my feelings or my nostalgia. If I say I believe in God, it would be the kind of god who provides all this beauty, not necessarily the kind of god who creates evil."

Hofkin's appreciation of landscape dates to childhood hikes with her father, a gregarious rabbi who instilled a reverence for the complexities of the natural world. Some of her images appear suffused with an almost supernatural light, as though the leaves are aflame while darkness closes in. Such effects introduce brooding psychological nuances, even a sense of threat, into her well-balanced formality.

"Even Eden wasn't always pleasant," she observed, always the rabbi's daughter. "If something beckons me, it's not just because it's pretty. It might speak of struggle and that necessity of having opposites. We don't know what light is without darkness, or what happiness is without struggle."

"It's a way of proving the existence of things that the human eye can't see otherwise," she said, "and the bonus is that they look very special. They look magical, and that enhances the sense of mystery."

Hofkin is well aware that she is working in a landscape tradition shaped by such giants as Ansel Adams, with whom she took a 1980 workshop at Yosemite. She scrutinizes and edits her work rigorously to keep it fresh and honest.

"I sit with my work a long time and pretend I'm someone else seeing it for the first time. I ask myself, 'Do you give a damn about this?' I can't put up something that doesn't speak over a period of time; it can't be just a pretty picture. It has to have a lot of layers to it."