Carl Chiarenza has had a lifelong love affair with mystery. The artist's work flirts with the secret nature of perception, and his path in life has followed winding uncertainty as it unfolded in ways he could not have anticipated. The Rochester native's story includes an impoverished childhood, being drafted into the military, a successful academic and creative career, and the development of an artistically sensitive mind and vision. He's open to unnamable possibility, and his artistic philosophy reflects this. The retired art and art history professor has been the artist in residence at UR for the past 10 years.

Chiarenza describes his journey as a mixture of chance and initiative. "In many ways, I've been very fortunate. Always by accident," he says. A child of the Depression, he was introduced to photography by a playground director on North Goodman Street at age 8. Chiarenza kept taking pics throughout his adolescence, working for his school newspaper and yearbook. He attended RIT, and then Boston University School of Communication for journalism. Upon graduation, and while waiting for a teaching contract, he was drafted into the army.

He describes the time that followed as "probably the worst two years of my life, even though I never went to war." When his discharge was frozen due to the Berlin Crisis, Chiarenza gained another way out by securing a scholarship for graduate work at Boston University, which eventually led to a doctoral degree in art history from Harvard. So in a way, the military led him to his academic career. Chiarenza marvels at Fortune's strange wheel, and advises his children not to despair, but to "look out for the doors that open".

The title to his new book is a nod to the ultimate mystery in art - from where do inspiration and our impressions of reality arise? Chiarenza says that although we can ponder the origin of the perceptions that inform artistic work, we can never be certain. But we can be sure that what we see in photographs is not the "reality" that we often take it to be. As a teacher, he challenged his students to think about the deceptive nature of photography.

That idea, of course, irritates many other shooters. Chiarenza explains that, "People in the business of photography just hate it when I say that," he says, because historically, photography captured reality. "That's the belief we've had for 180 years. The problem with that is, obviously it does give you information about what's in front of the camera, but...reality moves. You have two eyes, you're moving, stuff is moving, so capturing a second of time, looking through one eye in the camera, limited by the frame of the camera, you're obviously abstracting from reality all the time. So, to say it captures reality is an exaggeration."

He gives an example from his teaching career: the newspaper photograph of the death of Che Guevara, which was issued by the Bolivian government in 1967. "I would ask the class, ‘How do you know that's Che Guevara, and how do you know, if it is Che Guevara, he's dead?'" he says. "You can make up anything that you want to, and certainly, photojournalists who are good know how to do that.""

Chiarenza's artistic work similarly challenges viewers to think about what they are seeing. This, his sixth book, includes more than 90 images, spanning five decades from his entirely black and white portfolio. The subjects range from outdoor photography of abstractions of nature, to indoor photographs of collages he constructed.

The inside cover of the book explains Chiarenza's mission:"I want the viewer of my work to sense the power, to feel the presence of the unknown. All photographs share this life force of their own individuality. Somewhere between the making and the viewing of the picture, we experience this force, though our experience remains forever beyond satisfactory explanation."

It works. My initial viewing felt like a vicarious mystical experience, secondhand awe. This kind of art gets you to pay attention to the nuances we often overlook in the visual din of our modern culture. The elimination of color allows the viewer to get a stronger sense of Chiarenza's command over light and shadow. His photos are often delicate, always mysterious, and provide connections over time and place in a personal game of hide and seek with the universe. Early work captured abstractions from fleeting minutiae in nature, and those gestures in pattern and form are often echoed in later work, where Chiarenza arranged bits of detritus into miniature worlds, mysterious narratives, and imagined beings.

Chiarenza titles his pictures with a light touch. Even when he applies meaning to the abstraction, he encourages the viewer's imaginative interpretation. In "Marble Madonna, Ipswich" (1960), the crystals in the stone glow, creating a careful outline of both mother and unborn child. This sacred halo reoccurs on the facing page, in the collage photo "Untitled 143" from 2000. "Noumenon 382" (1984-85) looks to me like the interior of a cave, the motion of a fall, the air disturbed by wings, an echo. Its dark elegance is paired with "Cambridge 10" (1974), which resonates the suggestion of cave space pierced by light from above.

Included in the book are images from his two most recent series of photos, "Peace Warriors"and "Solitudes." The former is a direct reaction to the Iraq war, the latter a reaction to his reaction. Needing a way to vent his frustration with the war, in 2003 Chiarenza began creating photos of collaged "warriors," including a samurai, Don Quixote, and the Grim Reaper. I found his use of these symbols for our situation to be appropriate - the figures are complicated and contradictory, and there are dual meanings within.

Perhaps it takes a mature mind, one that has witnessed and reflected upon a few wars, to produce the calmly frustrated air of inevitability about this situation. Chiarenza's often misguided warriors allude to ancient cultures and literature, indicating the timelessness and futility of war. His samurai photos hold all of the stoic mystery of the enigmatic figures, as well as the dual nature of how they were received by the public. The servant-soldiers were socially problematic, and evoked a mixture of admiration, awe, fear, and disgust. So, do we support the troops? Don Quixote also serves as a metaphor for the current war: a soldier fighting battles based in imaginings and deception.

The "Solitudes" series then emerged from the need for an artistic separate peace. Through the subtle tension of meandering lines, the inclusive sweep of the recurring circle, and the shimmering energy of the textures, the viewer can focus on solitude, peace, mystery, and an individual relationship with the everlastingly unknown, or as Chiarenza calls it, "unnamable truth."

Both initial inspiration and the personal connections we make in another's art are mysterious and wonderful. Chiarenza says, "The best thing that can happen, for me, is when people see the pictures, it causes them somehow to make a connection with something that is important to them, and it causes them to go out and do something different." Sometimes, art can set off a chain of inspiration, serving as a unifying force for something bigger than each of us alone.