Photographic Interaction Married couple explore relationships, mortality, vulnerability in an engaging exhibition of their works at a downtown gallery

Doug Bohr and Julianna Foster, artists and former Winston-Salem residents, have known each other for 13 years and been married for about eight years. Their relationship directly or indirectly informs all of the color photographs and related works in their joint exhibition at 5ive & 40rty.

Its title, Tête-à-Tête -- borrowed from a series of photographs by Henri Cartier Bresson -- refers to the show's thematic focus on intimate, one-to-one conversation. In a statement about the show, Foster wrote that its images reconstruct a particular conversation that she had with Bohr. In his written statement, Bohr characterized the images more broadly as "in some ways representative of a dialogue that has taken place between us for the past 10 years or more." Neither statement is more specific than that.

Foster and Bohr got married when she was an undergraduate art student at UNC Greensboro and he was an associate curator at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, where he was employed for six years. In 2002 they moved to Philadelphia, where Foster last year received a master's degree in book arts and printmaking from the University of the Arts. After several years as the director of exhibitions and public programs at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum, Bohr now works as a senior culture-program associate with the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Foster and Bohr play a direct role as subjects in two of her large-format photos, which show them dressed casually and seated beside each other on a couch in a nondescript but dramatically illuminated setting. These images, like a number of others in the show, suggest isolated frames from a movie. It's as if we're glimpsing them during a couple of thoughtful pauses in a serious discussion. Their relationship as married partners is emphasized by the matching silver bands on their left-hand ring fingers, visibly gleaming in both photos.

Foster appears alone in two other still photos and a video loop, all from her "Condensation" series, in which her face is shown in close-up but rendered blurry and indistinct by virtue of being viewed through a wet panel of frosted glass.

She appears to be in the midst of taking a shower and peering at us through a semi-transparent stall door -- a metaphor for the emotional and psychological barriers that can exist between individuals in even the most intimate relationships. In the video, her face alternately advances toward and recedes from the wet glass. In advancing toward it, she forms an "o" with her mouth, as if saying something or preparing to kiss the glass; in receding from it, she almost seems to evaporate into foggy abstraction.

Bohr is a subject in only one other photo -- the largest here, at 2-by-3 feet -- for which he and Foster are both credited. The prevailing pitch-black darkness in this image is penetrated in the upper left by a gleaming starburst of white light, and in the lower center by a brightly spotlighted area where Bohr's bare arms and the right side of his face are visible.

He lies on his back, seemingly asleep or otherwise unconscious, on a patch of grass. His vulnerability is emphasized in the photo's title, Ollie, Ollie, in come free! -- a line from a children's game, indicating permission for entry or proximity, according to the game's rules.

Another young man and young woman serve as protagonists -- stand-ins for Foster and Bohr, perhaps -- in a group of six domestically set photos from Foster's "Tableau Series." The man's and woman's faces are shown in close-up profile views in the series' two larger photos, but they don't appear in the same frame in any of these photos, and this is the only one in which she's shown.

The young man also appears in a smaller photo from the "Tableau Series," seated at a table and looking lost in thought as his hands rest on a few papers, perhaps a letter whose message he's pondering. Several large paintings stacked up against a wall on one side of the room indicate that he's an artist.

A brightly illuminated candelabra-style chandelier overhead in the latter image resonates with the freestanding Candelabra in Bohr's photo of that title. Isolated in tight close-up against a black background, this silver table fixture holds five brightly burning candles whose white wax has largely melted and dripped down to form a dried pool around the base. The image serves as an effective metaphor for mortality.

In that respect, Bohr's Candelabra is directly related to Foster's two lightbox-mounted photo-transparencies, both titled Vanitas. Each is a close-up of a bouquet of lilies, tulips, irises and other flowers, visited by butterflies and bees, and set off against a black background. The two photos differ to the extent that the flowers appear fresh in one of them, while the other photo shows the flowers after they've wilted and begun to die.

In a kind of counterpoint to those emblems of death, Bohr alludes to gestation and birth in his two black-backgrounded, close-up views of an Umbilical Cord -- or so both photos are titled -- intertwined with a white nylon rope that symbolically highlights the idea of two individuals elementally bound to each other.

Among other works in the exhibition are three photographically based book-art pieces and a group of six photos from one of those books, on which Foster collaborated with another artist, Nadia Hironaka.

■ Julianna Foster's and Doug Bohr's show "Tête-à-Tête" is on view through Jan. 18 at 5ive & 40rty, 451-A N. Trade St. For more information, call 336-724-2474.