ARTWORKS BEGET PHOTOS IN GETTY EXHIBITION

When John Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” his words naturally created a work of art--a poem--not merely a precise, verbal description of an ancient vase. Similarly, photographers who have captured the likeness of sculpture or paintings have historically produced images that stand on their own as artworks.

An exhibit of 40 photographs by such luminaries as William Henry Fox Talbot, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Andre Kertesz and Man Ray at the J. Paul Getty Museum demonstrates this notion, said Ben Lifson, the exhibit’s guest curator. Photographs of artworks from antiquity to the late 1930s make up “Images That Yet/Fresh Images Beget . . .: Photographing Art.”

“The kind of literary response to an artwork utilized by Keats is known by the Greek word ekphrasis ,” said Lifson, an associate professor of photography at Bard College, New York. “The photographs in this exhibit are visual ekphrasis . The visual object (each photograph depicts) is the starting point for the photographs and the photographers represented brought the same creative spirit to their works as Keats brought to the problem of describing a Grecian urn.”

This concept is well illustrated by a Kertesz photograph on view, Lifson, visiting Los Angeles recently, said in a phone interview. The image depicts a statue representing the Republic of France presiding over a populated plaza. This action is seen through the transparent face of a large clock, whose one dark hand and Roman numerals obscure part of the Parisian scenario.

“The statue is a very important part of the picture--a hub for the movement of people in the photograph,” Lifson said. “But it is brought into and made part of a visual structure whose qualities are not the qualities of the statue, but are the qualities of the photograph” made up of a mix of different images--the clock’s hands and numerals and the sculpture.

“The statue becomes an image in a collage,” Lifson said. “But the sculptor who made it had no idea of collage, nor is there any aspect of collage in the statue itself.

“So we have two art objects pasted together in the shot to create a third art object whose visual qualities are not even indicated by the statue or the clock.”

“The exhibit contains many other photographs like this in which a work of art made in the distant past is made to appear part of a photographer’s artistic vision and has nothing to do with the artistic vision of the person who made the art object that the photograph represents,” Lifson said.

“Every photographer in the exhibit has been loyal to the truth-telling qualities of photography, so none of the photographs appear to distort or to falsify the original work of art they represent. Yet, the photographers have taken the original artworks up, out of their time and replanted them in the aesthetic preoccupations of artists of yet another time. It’s magic and there are many differing results.”

Photographs of art works “have been made since the beginning of photography and are found everywhere in its history,” Lifson said.

“The first known daguerreotype is of plaster casts in an artist’s studio and among the first known photographs on paper are also of works of art,” he said, and Talbot, the English inventor of photography, published a book of his works in the mid-1840s depicting several statues, old master drawings, a lithograph and decorative artworks.

However, largely because many such photographs were produced commercially for postcards or in scholarly texts, for example, by artists struggling to make a living, “it was the tendency up to five years ago to overlook these as not having been made seriously or ambitiously--meaning expressively or poetically,” Lifson said. “But the power of these works has been inescapable and the awareness of them has been growing.”

The Getty exhibit, whose title was taken from Yeats’ poem “Byzantium” (“Those images that yet, Fresh images beget . . .”) also includes photographs by Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray and Brassai, all from the museum’s permanent holdings. It will remain on view through Nov. 15.

POLITICAL ART: All Southern California artists are invited to submit slides of their work, in any media, for “Artists Recall,” a juried exhibition at Los Angeles City College in November addressing the recent or past history of Central America and related U.S. policies.

Organized by Los Angeles Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, the exhibition’s jurors are Joan Hugo, Catherine Lord, John Outterbridge and John Valadez.

Slides of works by all artists vying for entry in the exhibit will be included in a slide-projection display at the college gallery running concurrently with the juried exhibit.

Artists may send up to five slides and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Lee Whitten, Department of Art, Los Angeles City College, 855 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles 90029. Entries must be received by Oct. 15. Information: (213) 481-0555.

MOVING UP: Miguel Angel Corzo has recently been appointed to the newly created post of director of special projects for the Getty Conservation Institute, an operating entity of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

As a special projects consultant to the institute since 1985, Corzo was responsible for its in situ archeological conservation conference in Mexico (after a 1986 earthquake destroyed public artworks and buildings), assisted with the organization of a stained-glass conservation seminar in Spain, and has been instrumental in coordinating the conservation of the wall paintings in the tomb of Queen Nefertari in Egypt.

Corzo, who received an undergraduate degree in engineering from UCLA, serves on the faculty of several Mexican universities as a professor of engineering design.

Special projects undertaken at the Getty Conservation Institute bring together conservators, scientists and other professionals to address conservation issues of international concern.