‘CALIFORNIA PHOTOS’ HAS A DIFFERENT EXPOSURE

With 250 works on display, “California Photography: 1945-1980” is by far the largest exhibition yet mounted at Balboa Park’s Museum of Photographic Arts. Like the state it depicts, the show is vast and sprawling and impossible to really absorb in a single visit--and it seems even harder to absorb due to the compactness of the museum. Originally organized for the spacious confines of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this plethora of post-war pictures needs California-style breathing room, or it’s an exercise in sensory overload.

It’s also a rather controversial selection by San Francisco curator Louise Katzman. Her aim is to liberate the world image of California photography from its knee-jerk association with the vistas of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but by refusing to include any examples of their work, Katzman is wide open to charges of a skewed, overly subjective approach.

Skewed or not, her show underscores some important points--mainly that California has been at the photographic vanguard largely as a result of the GI Bill. That bill brought countless new students into California’s art schools, which in turn strongly supported the study of photography. Also well-underscored is the difference between the Northern and Southern California approaches to serious photography.

In San Francisco, such post-war camera gurus as John Gutmann and Minor White emphasized a blend of the painterly, journalistic and poetic. In Los Angeles, an emphasis on commercial photography indulged lots of color work, while the influential likes of Robert Heinecken encouraged an anything-goes, often anti-realistic bent. Heinecken’s two-part photo, “TV Dinner,” for example, is molded into a 3-D relief of frozen-food trays. A few feet away, there’s Jerry McMillan’s exquisite gimmickry: a photo-offset landscape printed inside a paper bag construction, and an elegant image of trees photo-etched on a coil of brass.

Fittingly, such experimental efforts are set well apart from the display’s “straight” photographs, but this kind of organization doesn’t amount to much. Eclectic and stringently democratic, Katzman’s selections give about equal space to each artist rather than weight the show according to the importance of particular photographers. This gives the show a dazzling, mosaic diversity--and affords something for every taste. Those who may long for a bit of Ansel Adams majesty will find a close enough approximation in the mystic, black-and-white landscapes of Minor White or Don Burke.

Inevitably, a fair amount of this work is not merely by California photographers but very much about California. Roger Minick’s “Flying Wing Station” perfectly depicts Los Angeles via the overweening, florescently lit flying wedge of a gas station roof--it resembles a close-encountered spaceship. Then there are (Museum of Photographic Arts director) Arthur Ollman’s strobe-lit, long-exposure night shots of suburban California homes: Technicolor dreamscapes. More realistic yet utterly cinematic are Richard Misrach’s sweeping desert panoramas intersected by the trace lines of human travel.

From the wide-open spaces to troubled modern interiors, the show offers plenty of compelling portraiture. Jack Welpott’s beautiful, melancholic woman seem the very models for an entire generation of femmes fatales. Donna-Lee Phillips offers a self-portrait series that comes with a diarist text about her inability to connect emotionally with herself and others. Eileen Cowin stages strained domestic arrangements--angular, Expressionistic tableaux of family members at odds with each other. Hal Fischler documents the questing hunger of Bay Area homosexual life.

Jim Goldberg’s subjects are either “The Privileged of San Francisco” or the down-and-out denizens of the same city’s seediest hotel, but in scribbling their messages onto his prints, all of them seem equally tragic. Then again, there are images of pure exaltation: Patrick Nagatani’s vivid, Cibachrome collages of cathedrals photographed in Europe are evocative--and worthy--of Robert Rauschenberg.

All of which goes a long way in defense of curator Katzman’s controversial approach. So diverse and broadly influenced is this photography that it’s hard to imagine anyone accusing it of regionalism or provincialism. Instead, it cuts clear across the modern art mainstream with its own cutting edge.

By the way, five of the photographers featured are slated to lecture here in conjunction with the exhibition. Ruth Bernhard speaks Wednesday, Linda Connor on Jan. 31, Robbert Flick on Feb. 7, Jack Welpott on Feb. 13, and Jerry McMillan on Feb. 21. All lectures are at the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park, at 7:30 p.m. Call the Museum of Photographic Arts for further details.