ART REVIEW : Thomas Lamb’s Interspersed Slices of Life Create Photographic Puns

Stand to the left of one of Thomas Lamb’s three-dimensional, accordion-folded photographs, and you are eyeballing a couple of dinosaurs looming over a vacant lot. Move a few paces, and the scene changes to a pair of huge concrete balls cradled in concrete. Read the title (“Which Came First?”), and it’s good for a giggle. Those concrete structures do look a lot like giant eggs.

Lamb, whose “California Landscape Series” is on view at the newly renovated gallery of the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach through Feb. 29, specializes in photographic puns created by alternating vertical “slices” of two different subjects.

After looking at a bunch of these photos, you get the idea that conceptualizing and shooting each one must be as effortless as eating peanuts. But that would slight the cool professionalism of Lamb’s individual shots as well as the sprightly acuity of his imaginative pairings.

In “The Engineers No. 18,” he juxtaposes views of a freeway overpass and the thick, fibrous limbs of cactus plants--similar structures that were both created by master engineers. “Gridlock” is the title for images of a dense crowd of joggers with numbers on their chests interspersed with views of rows of numbered valet receipts with attached car keys.

Sequoias and a monstrously tall figure of a logger in lace-up boots, a red shirt and black beard are both “Giants.” Mounted on a fan, photos of palm fronds create--what else?--a “Palm Fan.” Although this piece verges on gimmickry, the use of black-and-white photography adds a suitably vintage quality for an accessory associated with a more tranquil era of lemonade pitchers and porch swings.

Lamb earns his bread and butter as a photographer for Laguna Beach-based SWA Group, a landscape architecture design firm, a line of work that probably gave him entree to another kind of comparative subject. Among the name-tagged folk schmoozing on the lawn at a professional conference, he located a smiling Laurie Brown wearing a striped blouse and slacks and holding a drink. Her image alternates with views of Lawrie Brown, who opts for shades, a funky pin at the neck of her white blouse and a pair of jeans.

Art photography bristles with fancy techniques and even fancier theories these days. The basic idea is that there is no such thing as an “innocent eye” at a time when we are glutted with visual information and exposed to the phenomenon of national leadership via a carefully cultivated “image.” We are so used to looking at pictures of things, we don’t pay much attention to them anymore. And we are so used to being fed an airbrushed version of reality, we don’t trust photographs to tell us the truth.

Influenced as well by structuralist and semiotic theories about ways of “decoding” even seemingly obvious things in our world, some photographers argue that there is no longer anything to be gained by simply reproducing a chunk of reality.

Instead, they have been moving closer to the manipulations and inventions permitted in painting or printmaking. Since the 1970s, Los Angeles, famed for its celluloid illusions, has been a center of photography involving frankly artificial setups (such as Eileen Cowin’s posed tableaux) or wrenched-out-of-context juxtapositions intended as political or cultural commentary (such as Jeff Weiss’ multipart Cibachrome images).

Although surely not intended as such, Lamb’s genial photographic constructions are accessible and enjoyable introductions to the sometimes baffling, often complex artistic concerns that have pushed the limits of photography beyond the wildest imagination of its 19th-Century inventors.

Thomas Lamb’s “California Landscape Series” remains on view at the Art Institute of Southern California, 2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach, through Feb. 29. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. Call (714) 497-3309 for information.