ART REVIEW : ‘Viewpoints’ Smothers Photo Exhibit Viewers

A delightful picture of Albert Einstein and his wife is one of the many treats in the Museum of Photographic Arts’ current exhibit.

Wearing a feathered Indian headdress and holding a long, wooden peace pipe in the crook of his arm, the bushy-haired scientist, accompanied by his wife, is flanked by a group of solemn-faced Indians in native regalia. The theoretical physicist has an ear-to-ear grin, apparently waylaid by mirth at the thought of himself in this unlikely tableau.

The image looks just like the kind of snapshots that fill every family album. Yet the exposure by Eugene Omar Goldbeck amounts to a candid look at one of the major figures of the 20th Century.

It’s easy to miss Einstein in the small photograph. It is only one of more than 100 images by 75 photographers that vie for attention in the display, “Viewpoints: An Exhibition From the Permanent Collection.”

Indeed, while the vastness of “Viewpoints” proves the museum has an abundance of riches, the effect is one of claustrophobia. The gorgeous quality of the individual pieces is overwhelmed by the sheer number of images. This show desperately needed to be edited down, and more printed information about the artists would have further enhanced it.

The exhibit swamps the viewer in a virtual deluge of photographic overload. More than 120 years in the history of photography are surveyed, including the 19th-Century pioneers; the 20th-Century giants such as Andre Kertesz, Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and modern experimenters.

The tiny 5-year-old Museum of Photographic Arts is a mouse that roared. Operating on a small annual budget, it has acquired nearly 1,500 prints in its goal to build a collection that will document the entire 150-year history of photography.

This exhibit showcases 115 of the acquisitions made since the museum’s last permanent-collection show, in 1985. Curated by the museum’s director, Arthur Ollman, it prominently features the museum’s specialty areas: 19th- and 20th-Century documentary “expeditionary” photography, various schools of modern photography, and a growing collection of images from Latin America.

Ansel Adams’ “Aspens, Northern New Mexico” stands as a sublime example of darkroom expertise. Through skillful manipulation of the printing process, Adams transformed a common forest glade by placing half a dozen slim aspens in bold relief.

Around a corner from this section of contemporary Western landscapes hangs a surreal portrait of Dali by Philippe Halsman, in which everything--including the famed painter, his paintings, a chair and cats--are wildly airborne. Halsman is also represented by a 1952 portrait of a demure Marilyn Monroe at a drive-in diner, a tray of food attached to the window of her car.

Modernist Rafael Serrano captures an awful but fascinating sense of desolation in a piece from his “The Fertility of War” series. In the carefully constructed scene, an orange glow illuminates a blasted landscape. Huge, curving phallus-like creations dominate. The only distinguishable evidence of civilization is a crashed aircraft and an antique, but empty, chair.

The street photography from Latin America, including work by Mexico’s most acclaimed photographer, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, reveals the distinct ambiance of the Third World.

Rosalind Solomon brings an outsider’s point of view of Latin America to her pictures, as in the photo of a Peruvian woman suckling a lamb or that of a group of Guatemalan women standing barefoot around an open coffin. A Pepsi has been placed in the coffin beside the dead woman.

San Diegan Pablo Mason is represented in the Latin section with photographs of frolicking children in a dugout canoe and a blind man on the streets of Morelia.

An essential part of the history represented in this exhibition is photojournalism and documentary photography. Late-19th-Century European and American photographers were commissioned to photograph rarely seen portions of the world.

Pioneers like Francis Frith, William Soule, John Hillers and Adam Vroman lugged their bulky cameras and portable dark rooms across the American West, forded African rivers and trudged up Asian mountains to bring Western civilization the first photographs of these exotic lands.

The remarkable quality and detail of those creamy black and white scenic photos--such as Hillers’ shot of Shinumo Altar, a rock outcropping in the Grand Canyon--remain uneclipsed by the images of today’s high-technology cameras.

The “Viewpoints” exhibit contains much more material than can be covered here. There are Barbara Kasten’s large, decorative color photographs, the stop-action strobe photography of Robert Heinecken, Robbert Flick’s photomontage landscape, and the painted-over photographs of Faiya Fredman and Holly Roberts.

Again, the abundance of works almost does a disservice to the individual pieces. Rather than smother the viewer with so many different kinds of images, the museum might do better to share its wealth by focusing on two or three dozen pieces at a time. That way both the photographs and the viewer would have room to breathe.

“Viewpoints: An Exhibition From the Permanent Collection” continues at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park through March 13.