Rocky Gonet sees the light—and he’s going to chase its meaning wherever it leads him.

This Washtenaw Community College photography instructor’s exhibit “Chasing Light” at the Ann Arbor District Library’s Lower-level Meeting Room illustrates his unceasing effort to crystallize his visual imagery.

It’s a hard-fought, deceptively nuanced effort; the unique quality of Gonet’s photography is its calm. There’s a stillness that runs consistently from composition to composition.

“The photographs included in this exhibit are a result of my obsession with chasing light,” says Gonet’s exhibit statement. “I’m fascinated by the quality of light and its ability to determine the visual impact of an image.

“Certainly light influences texture, form, and color within a photograph. More importantly, light within a photograph influences mood. Light contributes to the sense of place and the emotional experience of ‘being there.’”

The 23 photos in the display—some color, some sepia-toned, and others black and white—are rigorous landscape meditations. It’s only on careful examination that the particular solitude he’s chasing reveals itself.

His sepia “Sleeping Boats” uses a keen visual exactitude to abet the composition’s moody allure. In this instance, a series of foreground diagonal wood planks along the water’s edge meander into the heart of the composition. Four foreground are rowboats seemingly tossed casually against a stand of pine trees — but they point diagonally parallel to the wood planks. As a result, the work is a wholly realized superior composition.

Among the color photographs, Gonet’s curiously austere “Beautiful Morning” is a cloudbank portrait contrasted against a patch of irregular tawny waterline. The work would seem nearly nondescript except for a green shrub Gonet’s captured against the landscape’s interior. It’s remarkable how a simple spray of contrasting color can break up the dominate texture of a color scheme so thoroughly as to enliven the entire composition.

Ultimately, Gonet’s black and white “Delhi Park Morning” shows us the extent of his talent as a photographer. This wintry mid-ground row of barren trees with the park melting into the mist is supplemented by a foreground chain-link fence in the work’s left corner. The simple strategy of giving the viewer a series of natural interior visual recessions in contrast to a manmade chain-link foreground creates a memorable visage of this regional park as Gonet's exacting eye gives the photograph a carefully thought-out internal complexity that unifies the work.

All of Gonet’s photographs in this display indeed chase light. But they also exhibit a self-contained meaning that enhances their spare pictorial narrative. Rocky Gonet is an example of the artful minimalist who finds worlds upon worlds to uncover on a minute scale. And this consistency that makes his chase all the much more memorable.

“Chasing Light: Photography by Rocky Gonet” will continue through Oct. 13 at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Exhibit hours are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday; 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday; and noon-6 p.m. Sunday. For information, call 734-327-4200.