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FINE ART: Fools For The City

Three photography shows examine the human presence in the cityscape

By Chuck Twardy 


Urban Fusions
By: Susan Bowen
Where:Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery
When: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Tue.-Fri.; 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sat.
Info: 229-4674

Lost Vegas/Found
By: Gregg Segal, Ana Maria Rodriguez
Where: Contemporary Arts Collective
When: Noon-4 p.m. Tue.-Sat.
Info: 382-3886


Photo by Keith Shimada

Exult, if you want, about the grand landscapes of Ansel Adams, the silky still lifes of Edward Weston, the quirky portraits of Annie Liebowitz. Hand a camera to a Henri Cartier-Bresson or a Garry Winogrand, and the city tells more tales than any mountain peak, pepper or pop star.

As it happens, you can take in three good urban-photography shows in the Valley, all Downtown and two in the same gallery.

Urban Fusions, New Yorker Susan Bowen's "panoramic multiple exposures" made in her town, occupies the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery through August 15. Two photographers' very different views of our town can be seen through July 10 at the Contemporary Arts Collective. Gregg Segal's Lost Vegas refers not to imploded resorts but to another forgotten side of the city, its Downtown denizens. Ana Maria Rodriguez's Found, on the other hand, finds the peculiar misshapings of the desert that the city causes.

Both Segal and Rodriguez show us things that are within our gaze but largely unseen. Bowen asks the viewer to see the city in a whole new perspective.

Using a cheap, plastic panoramic camera and advancing the film only partway after each exposure, Bowen overlaps fragments of urban sites and sights. In some cases, she produces a crystalline, kaleidoscopic image, as when she uses the vectors formed by tracks, platform and shelter to fragment light and shade in "Prospect Park Angles." She also can imply a giddy sense of motion, resolving a building's rear-window reflections into a departing Volkswagen Beetle in the black-and-white "Reflections to Go."

But her graphic intentions seem more social than formal. The show is given mostly to images from parades, both celebratory and condemnatory, and not all of them are fortuitously revealing or compelling.

"Orange Jacket and Macy's," like several others of its sort, captures an antiwar march from last year, and has a fine sense of false panorama built by collage. The titles often direct attention to details, in this case the facade of the famous store and a man outside the action, like Bowen, holding a camera.

Segal's social concerns are more frankly observed. The Vagabond Motel is the ironic epicenter of this suite, uneasy home to low-income workers and likely itinerants of a sort the name does not denote. Most of the images are from three or four years ago, and several appeared in a 2002 Los Angeles Times Magazine photo-essay. Are these folks still around? Will you still find "Stanley Alexander in his room at the Vegas Motel," nibbling a chicken leg on the bed, tallboys on nightstand, suitcase open? Or is he like the spectral pedestrian passing through the harsh light under the wrecked marquee of a check-cashing joint in "Late Night, Fremont Street?"

These are not only rich observations, they are striking images. An amber sliver of dawn between a convenience-store roofline and a low shelf of cloud contrasts with the pale violet sweater of a young but worn-looking woman clutching two 12-packs of Old Milwaukee in "Dawn Hoover, 6 a.m. on a Saturday, Fremont Street."

Rodriguez's splendidly toned lambda prints plow another field entirely, the collision of the artificial urban and the unruly desert. The domain here is another sort of irony, in which the human presence is only implied. A foreground gravel mound echoes the distant mountains' ridge line in one print; in another, a gravel heap holds the middle distance before a ridge line of house roofs. Elsewhere, pristinely mown lawn stretches before a low house with ridiculous columns. Ticky-tacky apartments crowd the horizon of a print, whose middle-distance is a glowing blur of sprinklered water.

Taken together, the three shows offer three distinct urban views: the kaleidoscopic panorama of crowds and infrastructure, the isolation of society's margins, and the human presence traced without a soul to be seen.

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