The images in “Nudes We Have Known,”...

The images in “Nudes We Have Known,” at Seewald’s (1114 N. Old Highway 101, Leucadia), may not all be familiar, but most subscribe to a formula of nude photography that we know all too well.

It goes like this: male photographer shoots female subject; model adheres to conventional ideals of beauty and is appropriately young and svelte; photographer sees her as object of formal or erotic delectation and produces a still-life (rather than a portrait) that relies more on the objective beauty of its components than on distinction of vision or approach.

Five of the six photographers included in the Seewald’s show are men, and they play their assumed roles to a fault. It is no coincidence that the show’s strongest work is by its sole female participant, Ruth Bernhard, who bestows a monumentality and dignity to her subjects without sacrificing them to sexual objectification.

Her “Veiled Black” (1974) presents a standing nude, head tipped back and in profile, elbows angled out and arms meeting at the waist. The figure’s graceful, balletic posture conveys inner strength within a delicate shell, a notion echoed by the diffusion of the dark figure’s contours into the surrounding white space. In “Luminous Body” (1962), Bernhard’s posing and lighting transform a standing figure into a wisp of smoke whose flickering shadows define the body’s curves.

Bernhard’s company in the exhibition are David Allen, Fran Stetina, Brett Weston, Aaron Chang and Chuck Kimball, all of whom are capable of producing attractive images. Allen’s “Striped Torso,” in which light passing through a window shade draws sinuous lines down the back of a reclining nude, is a fine example, as is Weston’s only work in the show, “Underwater Nude” (1979), which similarly laces a figure with patterns of light. Allen’s other photographs, however, are no more than grainy, romantic still lifes that infuse no new life into this genre. Stetina’s series of nudes photographed outdoors are equally predictable.

Chang, by profession a surfing and sports photographer, presents several images of women in variably athletic positions. One in which a high-heeled figure rests on hands and feet, her body arched upward with her back to the ground, recalls the offensively sexist fashion photography of Helmut Newton. Kimball’s three recent series demonstrate an aggressive interest in unusual techniques, from using paper negatives to solarization, but the imagery itself hardly justifies the means. Some evoke the forced seductiveness of lingerie advertisements; all betray the self-consciousness of Kimball’s attempt at spontaneous form.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 8.

The Mary Moore Gallery (2173 Avenida de la Playa) is offering a suitably brief showing, through July 30, of the work of Edith Namias and Alexandra Whitney. Namias’ collages, which she calls “Transformations,” convert torn, rubbed, colored, wrinkled and otherwise battered fragments of magazine pages into semi-abstract landscape images.

By muting the magazines’ artificially vivid colors and turning the glossy surface into fodder for abrasion, Namias transforms a slick product into a seemingly organic one. Her “Rock Wall” series, in which the paper-smooth components evolve into crusty, faceted boulders, is Namias’ most successful, but, like all of her work, it is more engaging on a microscopic than macroscopic level.

The energy and experimentation that gave birth to the collages’ textural relationships falls slack in their compositions. Though details and small passages within the works can be interesting and complex, they are usually buried within an overall blandness and timidity. Namias’ oil paintings on paper, also on view, reduce the landscape to simple, geometric structures composed of horizontal bands of ill-matched color. They suffer from a facile, decorative uniformity.

Whitney’s small bronze sculptures of animals and human heads are technically competent, but show no individual interpretation of her subjects. Her two standing and table-lamp bases have slightly more spirit, recalling but not equaling the decorative works of Diego and Alberto Giacometti, seen earlier this year at the Thomas Babeor Gallery.