Photographer Richard Nagler Captures Links Between Art, Viewer

In a gallery at the Chicago Art Institute, a young woman with pale bare shoulders, pearl-drop earrings and coppery-brown hair pulled into a knot pauses to look at Titian's painting of a reclining nude woman with coppery-brown hair, pearl-drop earrings and skin of the same fair hues. At the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, a man in a blue baseball cap and blue shirt with light blue flowers leans in to take a closer look at Vincent van Gogh's famous "Irises" painting. [...] at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a woman with a purse embroidered with a chimp's face and piercing eyes stands in front of Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" painting, where the bottom of the canvas reveals a monkeylike visage. Nagler's office - filled with antique cameras, framed photos, art, paintings, books and ephemera - was where Hawkeyes member Whoopi Goldberg worked. The idea for Nagler's new book, published by Heyday, came about in 2007, when he was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and noticed people taking pictures in the galleries. The woman suddenly but slightly twisted her torso and held her arms up behind her head, her right elbow forming a V - a pose that strangely, wonderfully, mimicked the female figures in the painting. Mirroring elementsMany of the images are startling for the mirroring elements: A woman with a patchwork jacket and skullcap blends into Gottfried Helnwein's "Epiphany II (Adoration of the Shepherds)," and a woman with a geometric-patterned scarf looks like an extension of Ellsworth Kelly's "Cite." Nagler's next book, "Oakland Rhapsody," released in 1995 and with a foreword by poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, portrays what Nagler calls "a beautiful city with interesting light." 'Layers of complexity'Malcolm Margolin, the publisher of Heyday books, wrote the foreword to Looking at Art and asks, What makes these photos so appealing - indeed, so transformative? Margolin added, "There's an immediacy to these photos, a freshness of accident, a delight in the moment (and) a masterful sense of color and composition."