The work of Dan Kane is a fascinating interplay of the timeless and the time-bound.

Normally we think of photography as a process that stops time. It slices 1/100th of a second out of time, out of whatever happens to be in front of the camera, and freezes it on film, preserving it as though in an time capsule for later viewers. That is the fascination of old anonymous snapshots, to see what people and places looked like, "how things were then" and the power of the keepsake photo that allows us to remember just how a lover looked, before time and age had their way.

But there are other things that photography can do with time as well. It can persuade us that it is showing us the timeless, probing behind the chance circumstances of time to the very unchanging essence of things. That is a function to which the nude lends itself particularly well, proclaiming the intention of stripping away the superficial, changing fashions of clothing to reveal to us the essence of "man" or "woman". Setting the subject against a plain black or white background, without props, eliminating the clues to time given by interior decoration, can be another visual signifier of this universalizing intention. Of course, there is a sense in which basic body shapes are a give-away of time - there is no way one would mistake the body of a typical turn-of-the-last-century man or woman for one from the 1950's, or in turn for one of the 1990's, but a photographer can minimize this by choosing perhaps atypical, timeless subjects who embody what is thought to be universal.

There, however, lie more pitfalls. Much work that claims to find essences only finds clichés: men are dynamic and strong, women are fecund and luxuriant. Moreover, the visual codes in which these clichés are "found" are themselves dated: not only the bodies of their models but also the photographer's visual vocabulary for expressing masculinity allows us to distinguish a Von Gloeden from a Platt Lynes. To successfully probe what is universal, photographers must not only get behind physical superficialities, but also mental commonplaces.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that Dan Kane convinces the viewer that he does this. He sidesteps the clichés to show us strange combinations of strength and vulnerability, of dynamism and introversion which convince us that he has gotten behind trite accepted definitions to find the true essence the individual men in front of his camera, who then stand for the essence of all males.

Ironically, it would appear that this timelessness is obtained through its total opposite, a time-bound process. In the work seen here, Kane uses large-format Polaroid films. The most obvious result of this is the distinctive, rich tonality of his prints, which is characteristic of the Polaroid process and no other. But it is another characteristic of working with Polaroid materials which interests me here: the fact that one has almost instantaneous results to examine.

Most photographers use Polaroid materials only to check the lighting and set up, and then shoot with regular films. But when working with regular photographic materials that must be sent out to a lab, it can be hours, even days, before the subject sees the results of a shot or session, far too late for it to provide any feedback, I suspect that a major factor in Dan Kane's success at getting his subjects to reveal themselves for his camera - and thus to convince us that we are seeing their real essence and in turn, the real essence of men - is the feedback and rapport that is established as they constantly, through a session, see the results, making them more deeply his collaborators in the creative process.

In a pleasant irony, it is perhaps only by being totally caught up in a process absolutely bound by time that Dan Kane arrives at the sense of timelessness in his work.