PHOTO SHOW : BARROW’S INVENTORY OF IMAGES

Artists who finally get tardy recognition are probably pleased, but it can be slightly fuddling for an audience to suddenly face several decades’ worth of unfamiliar work. It is tough to weigh just exactly how it all slots into the ragtag series of facts and impressions we use to track history that is still being written.

Thomas Barrow, 48, has been quietly photographing away in New Mexico since the ‘60s. He started out focused on graphic design, films and prints. Since evolving into a photographer, he has acted as a curator, editor, writer and teacher.

The subject of several New York shows, he is included in anthologies but has remained a virtual cipher in these parts until turning up as the subject of the inaugural exhibition for the new photography galleries at the County Museum of Art. The exercise was organized by curator Kathleen Gauss and comes with a useful catalogue.

The show (on view until May 10) is accurately called “Inventories and Transformations” and includes some 160 works grouped in series. They belong to the general genre of collaged hybrid photography. In Barrow’s case, you also get the strong impression of a collage of sensibilities ruled by rational distance.

An early series called “The Automobile” is made up of black-and-white diptychs whose crisply outlined images and patterns of cars look purely formal, like the work of Barrow’s teacher, Aaron Siskind. Then one catches on to faces behind car windows and an implicit Pop social commentary in junky gas stations, the scruffy observations of Robert Frank.

Barrow’s results are unfailingly gorgeous in the making--precise and clear even when dealing with the idea of spontaneity. A later series of “canceled” prints comes on like tawdry New Mexico landscapes defaced by scratching after printing. In fact, the scratches are a formal device organizing space and composition while ruminating on the vulnerability of photographic imagery. We’ve seen the motif often in the paintings of Joe Goode.

Exceptionally intelligent. When Barrow wants to comment on the creepy fetishism in the world of fashion, he prints rag-mag images in reversed negative, making them ghostly. But they look like cleaned-up Verifax collages by Wallace Berman. He heaps contempt on the masturbatory eroticism of television, as well as on the pseudo-religious pulpits of the news anchors. But it’s like cleaned-up Robert Heiniken and has the same masochistic edge. It’s the loathing of an addict.

His conceptual ideas work beautifully. Shots of people’s libraries are like pictures of the insides of minds. They range from bohemian fervor for a beloved, dog-eared, paperback James Joyce to the men’s-club smugness of the doctors’ leather-bound books.

Everything Barrow does works, but his suave shifts in style seem to follow rather than lead, and his ability to slip on a new manner like a Gucci suede jacket is like the operation of an adept graphic designer. The work treats its commonplace imagery with the pristine manners of a refined gentleman amateur. The resulting side effect--possibly unintended--is a dandified contempt that holds emotion at arm’s length.

In later compositions, Barrow discovers the Cubist collage and wordworks. They combine photo printing with graffiti-like spray paint, but instead of the expected scatology, we get grad-school art-babble such as “Replicate Vector Space” and “Perturbation Theory.” It contributes to a mounting impression that this is a form of academic salon art subsisting on virtuosity and allusions to “classical” art--meaning contemporary painting with Rauschenberg as Zeus.

Recent work blackens with real anger and plays with colored Polaroids of high-tech toys, such as Japanese warrior robots. Intellectually, it seems like an illustrator’s furious commentary on Post-Modernism, but it continues this art’s habit of chatting smoothly about intellectual subjects when the real content here is the practiced and elegant style of an aristocratic visual aesthete.