Teri Vershel – Relative Strangers

Review by Lee Halvorsen •

The individual street images in Perfect Strangers are delightful and bursting with the emotion and environmental texture of the moment. Teri Vershel connected with people and places so candidly I felt as if I were looking through the camera’s viewfinder with her. In his foreword for the book, Sam Abell called her images musical, like Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue; saying her images accurately captured the reality, the chaos, the truth and the flow of the street. Abell contends that Vershel is “…in tune with the rhythm…” of the chaos of the street AND has the patience to wait for just the right moment to snap the shutter and capture the poetics of the urban experience.

The book was a joy to hold, hardcover with thick, sewn pages. The substantial weight paper with a luster finish enhanced the colors, shades, and tones of the images and felt good to the touch.

The individual images are superb, poetic…the emotion, the place, the people, are center stage without artifice or metaphor, Abell’s truth. The quality of the images is stunning, and is heightened by the moment…the emotion, lighting, look, weather, and props of what was in the image. For instance, the image from San Francisco was about the young lady’s smile, her companion with flowers but also about the place’s graffiti and English and Chinese characters on the signs. Similarly, one can almost feel the Palo Alto drizzle which may have recently passed by…no raindrops on the puddles and walking without hurry albeit with an umbrella. But these individual images are…well, only half the story.

The book’s subtle theme is hidden in plain sight in its title Relative Strangers, and at first, I missed the obvious hint. Although each of the images is the power and the delight of this book …the facing page with their found pairs, diptychs…the “relative strangers” added a new and fun dimension! Communication between the two images! Vershel had made the images in the years prior to the pandemic and then during the pandemic she painstakingly went through many, many pictures to find “related” images…somehow related in the image itself and not necessarily in the image’s place, setting, or people.

Each one of the diptychs has an element similar to or connected with the image on the facing page. For instance, the image with a smiling, young women, the graffiti, the multi-language writing, the bright red object, and the phone was similar to (but not a replicant of) the image on the facing page, taken in Barcelona. The image of a partial view of a woman walking in the rain has similar elements to its facing image…red, rain, woman walking and the ever-present street.

This book is a must read, a must enjoy! The images are wonderful, the rhythm and sequencing of the diptychs is awesome and when you see how the two images talk with one another it’s like thinking of the last letter in the crossword! This is truly a remarkable book: art, emotion, and as close to street life as you can get without actually being there.

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Contributing Editor Lee Halvorsen is a visual artist and author.

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Relative Strangers, Teri Vershel

Photographer/Author: Teri Vershel, resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

Essays by Sam Abell and Teri Vershel

Text: English

Hardcover; stitched binding; 116 pages paginated with 94 photographs; printed by Ofset Yapimevi, Turkey; ISBN-13: 9781954119277

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