‘BABY PICTURES’--BY AND FOR EX-TOTS

“Baby Pictures,” says the pink-and-blue lettering on a gallery wall of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and there they are: 67 photographs of cute, fat, messy, funny, irritating infants as seen through the lenses of 36 artists, many of whom are the children’s parents.

The exhibition (through June 22) is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, but it’s also the most radical photography show in recent memory. Charming subjects are not generally welcome at serious art museums. If the kids get in, what’s to prevent shaggy dogs and fluffy kittens?

Timothy Hearsum, the museum’s curator of photography, and Richard Ross, guest curator of the show, aren’t worried. They have taken on a cliche--the stuff of county fairs and family albums--and proved that there’s more than sentimentality to it. They have also introduced some little-known artists along with previously unshown works by photographers who have built their reputations on more dignified topics.

“These are not big names,” Ross observed, looking around a gallery that showcases as many aesthetic attitudes as conditions of babyhood. Most celebrated (and the only artist not living) is Wynn Bullock, whose gelatin silver print, “Navigation Without Numbers,” is a recent museum purchase. This magical image pictures two small white bodies that seem to be charting a course across a big black bed as if it were a midnight sea or a mountain.

Among less prominent photographers, Russell Banks has cropped close-ups of an infant’s bare flesh in sensuous abstractions. Nicholas Graetz’s sweet shot has a 3-day-old baby looking over an adult’s shoulder, one eye open, the other closed and pressed into a denim collar.

High-flying babies (held by adult arms) look like heroic hood ornaments in Earl Scott’s silhouetted images, while Robert Holmgren’s close-up of a man smooching a child’s upturned cheek sets most visitors to cooing.

The images aren’t sugarcoated, however, and there are some prunes amid the Pablum. In “Graduating Class: The Bradley Birth Course,” Jim Klukkert presents a lumpy quartet of tots propped up against each other on a plaid couch, like sacks of potatoes. Judy Gelles exposes the frazzled quality of parental life in her photo of a nursing mother and a diapering father, coupled with the text “We were up all night again. . . . It’s been 3 1/2 years now since we’ve had a full night’s sleep without interruptions.”

“Baby melt-down,” Ross declared, as I stared in disbelief at Vance Gellert’s image of an infant whose center of gravity seems to be sinking as he sits in a bird cage. This sounds far more ominous than it looks, for Gellert’s staged fantasies are too whimsical to be very worrisome. A major discovery of the exhibition, the Bay Area artist shows six intensely colored interiors in which a contented baby reclines on a festooned piano bench, watches TV with his stuffed toys and appears to witness a murder.

Ross talks of the pictured babies as both “the glue that bonds couples together and a wedge between them.” When infants are photographed with their parents, the body language can be deafening. In Susan Hacker’s outdoor family portraits, the mothers and babies entwine naturally, while the youthful fathers stand stiff and separate. The parents of Celia Jordon’s subjects thrust their young ones out front to peer into the future. And in one of Nancy Stuart’s perfect studio photographs, a light child riding in a backpack fairly glows as the woman carrying her recedes into darkness.

Nearly everyone able to point and shoot a camera has taken baby pictures, including Ross. A proud father and an accomplished photographer who is incapable of being boring, he resisted putting his own work in the show. Once his idea got rolling, he and Hearsum were astonished at how much substantive material was available and--given time and funding--how much more extensive the exhibition might have been.

As it stands, Ross sees the exhibition as focusing on the intrinsic value of the infants themselves, rather than on glorification of artists’ progeny or on family documents. “The photographers are captivated by some innocence, naivete and purity that the infant represents,” he wrote in the illustrated catalogue.

It’s a deeply romantic notion, backed up by the photographers’ pervading sense of awe and compassion and balanced by realism.

“As cruel as we are as a species to our adults, we protect our infant and innocent,” Ross continued. “When this code is violated, the society as a whole rises with all its resources and indignation. Child molesters are isolated and shunned in prisons by other inmates. Our infants remain our magic.”