Double take

Over the last 15 years Scott Broberg has taken more than 20,000 photographs.

Five years ago while sifting through his work, he noticed patterns — some natural, others caused by tricks of the camera — but all somehow having a twin in their configuration with another photo in his collection.

Broberg, the film and video department coordinator at Orange Coast College, says he noticed how a photo of a set of train tracks meandering along the industrial banks of Chicago mirrored another shot of a river curving through a Midwest countryside.

“I found shots that maybe had nothing to do with each other, some five years and 1,000 miles apart,” Broberg said.

Sometimes the patterns play out in simple shapes, a circle or a square, other times it gets more complex, he added.

Originally intending to publish the coupled images in a book, Broberg dropped that thought when he was contacted in mid-December about displaying his work for a solo show at the ARTery, a gallery constructed from storage bins at the back of the Lab anti-mall in Costa Mesa.

Broberg scrambled to get things together for the Jan. 20 opening. The images paired up quite well, but in deciding where to mount the shots, another motif emerged for the Huntington Beach resident.

“The two shots framed together matched, but the left shot also matched the right shot of the next pair, and so on,” he said. And so in groupings of roughly five pairings at a time, the display played out along one gallery wall as if it were some oversized vertical game of dominoes.

“I tend to focus on composition and cropping, concentrating your attention on just what I want you to see,” Broberg said. “Quite a few, however, are aerial images. A view from 30,000 feet up of Utah desert and farmlands in the Midwest.”

Kicking off the idea for the show in Broberg’s head, a photograph of a weed in the desert uncannily resembled a time-lapsed shot of a moving carnival attraction. What looked like eyelashes wrapped around a fuzzy bubble wand on the weed, almost perfectly matched the glowing scars of light from the swirling carnival ride.

Although many shots were snapped in different states, countries and continents, many have been discovered right in Broberg’s Orange County. Like the OCC aviation graveyard, which houses discarded airplane parts. “If you look at it wide, it’s just a bunch of junk,” Broberg said. “But if you focus on it a certain way, centering on things,” you get, for instance, a face or a floating egg.

A piece titled “Astonished” captures faux facial features from airplane equipment with three circular openings like eyes, and a mouth making an “oh” face. Paired with it, three onions on the grill of a Korean restaurant in Garden Grove make the same shocked expression.

How far apart in time these shots occurred, only Broberg knows.

“I really don’t want to be the kind of photographer that turns into a cataloguer,” Broberg said. “That’s why I’m not interested on detailing exactly what year I took the shot or what F-stop I used. I want people to focus on the image, not the technical information.”

Broberg mans his exhibition from noon to 9 p.m. Friday through Sunday, since he has a film department to coordinate during the week. Sunday he answered a number of questions and fielded praise for his work from visitors and potential buyers.

One piece, entitled “Tourists Are Like Gum,” pairs an image of the famous Pike Place Market Gum Wall in Seattle, with an image of tourists wandering aimlessly in front of the Czech Republic’s Prague Cathedral.

Such images challenge viewers to provide their own frames of reference.

“You can put your own perspective into them,” former OCC film student Ivan Gonzalez said. He and several of OCC’s past and present film students stopped by to check out Broberg’s show Sunday afternoon.

“The gum people, the fact of comparing people to gum, I like it,” Gonzalez said. “To me tourists are almost as annoying as gum.”

The show is scheduled to end Feb. 5.