The Gallery Store’s current exhibition represents photojournalism...

The Gallery Store’s current exhibition represents photojournalism at its most effective and enlightening. Bob Mahoney’s photographs of “Stephen Jenteel/A Person With AIDS” join forces with the accompanying texts to achieve a potency that neither the words nor images could attain alone.

While the words substantiate the images with concrete information and direction, the images lend the words a powerful immediacy and directness.

Mahoney’s series chronicles the last four months of Jenteel’s losing battle against AIDS. A former school teacher, gay activist and social worker, Jenteel felt he had a mission to educate others about the reality of AIDS. With the collaboration of Mahoney and journalist Jonathan Bor, he made his story public, in the form of four front-page articles in a Syracuse, N.Y., newspaper.

The articles, included in the exhibition, present a straightforward account of both the physical and psychological impact of the disease. Mahoney’s images and Bor’s words transform AIDS from a political, statistical issue into a personal battle to sustain one’s life while retaining independence and dignity.

Mahoney portrays Jenteel with clarity and sensitivity, interspersing images of him in familiar, everyday contexts with others that place him in the less familiar world of the gravely ill. However, even a genre scene of Jenteel at home petting his cat assumes ominous overtones, given the caption’s insight that a parasitic disease common to cats could pose a serious threat to Jenteel.

The photographs have a deeply penetrating collective impact, in part because Mahoney shows Jenteel as a living individual experiencing a full range of emotions, and not simply as a victim, closed to all but pain and defeat. Mahoney doesn’t spare us those aspects, but he also shows moments of meditation, irony and humor.

One image offers an oblique view over Jenteel’s shoulder, past the intravenous feeding tube in his wrist, to the newspaper he’s reading. The page is opened to a Dear Abby column headed “The Facts About AIDS.” The juxtaposition of Jenteel’s expressionless face, marked with cancerous lesions, and Abby’s omniscient smile illustrates the chasm that typically separates news about AIDS from the intimate realities of the disease. Mahoney and Bor remedy the problem in their powerfully moving document.

The exhibition, at 724 Broadway, has been extended through Aug. 1.

Each of the artists in “The Phoenix Three,” at the new Mary Moore Gallery (2173 Avenida de la Playa, La Jolla), vacillates between eloquence and forced poetry.

In Marta Boutel’s vibrant monoprints, ebullient rhythms are formed by repeated silhouettes of figures, frozen in the animated, ambiguous gestures common to Robert Longo’s subjects. “Odd Man Out” contains four such figures, all defined by dazzling red and black pattern except for one, whose solid black “skin” distinguishes him and raises questions pertaining to conformism and isolation.

Boutel’s depiction of people as one-dimensional, decorated surfaces takes her critique a step further by suggesting the shallow illusion on which identities are judged. Unfortunately, the image of a pair of scissors, figuratively excising the black figure from the group, diminishes the poignant possibilities of the work, and threatens to reduce it to the level of coy humor. The figures in Boutel’s compositions have a consistently powerful presence, but they are forced to compete with frivolous touches such as the recurring scissors and backgrounds too closely resembling new wave decorator wallpaper.

Kevin Irvin’s ornate wood constructions, most taking the basic form of the upper section of a grandfather clock, are technically exquisite and exceedingly elegant. Within the clock form, Irvin combines references from the past--fluted columns, nostalgically spiraling vines--with miniature cityscapes representing the slick architecture of the present. The cracked glass of the clock faces and the splintered lower edge of each piece serve as morbid reminders that time causes all to pass, even the grandest of civilizations.

Irvin’s deft combinations of refined and disintegrating relics can be haunting, but such sensations are often elicited through the most obvious of means. This is especially true of “Wake (Farewell to Love),” a small wooden coffin with its cracked glass cover opened to reveal various delicately carved contents. Such dependence on easy, literal referents--a coffin to signify death, clocks to suggest the passage of time and glory--detracts from the originality of Irvin’s constructed and carved forms.

Marc D’Ambrosi, working in bronze, is the most restrained of “The Phoenix Three.” His abstracted figural forms are quietly mysterious, bearing a structural simplicity and elegance, but they leave no deep impression. Only one of the pieces, “The Excommunication of John Doe,” a life-sized skeletal rendition of a soldier, exudes any measure of passion.

The show continues through July 11.