Orange County

Vintage plastic cameras sit for their outsize portraits in a 1983 Cibachrome series by Bay Area photographer Victor Landweber. With their square, lovable titles (“Brownie Starlet,” “ANSCO Panda”) and bastardized Moderne bodies, these fixed-focus toys of the ‘40s and ‘50s were designed to sell mostly on the basis of style, not versatility or technical refinement.

Landweber shot them separately against black backgrounds in crisp, head-on views, bordered by a squirt of soft white light, an effect reminiscent of old-fashioned “silhouetting” in commercial art (the isolation of an object from its background). The images offer wry commentary on the peculiar ingenuity of American manufacturing as well as the totemic nostalgia such throw-away products assume for succeeding generations.

Colorado photographer Vidie Lange chose to use a plastic “Diana” camera as a way of emphasizing the artifice in “Diana and Las Vegas” a series big Cibachromes, produced several years ago. Diana’s fixed eye stared at pockets of Vegas nightlife: mirrors reflecting an X-rated film churning on a wall-mounted TV above miles of red cut-velvet bedspread; a blond stripper with perfect lips and milk-white breasts flinging out her arms below a swag of red drapery; a statuesque palm tree irradiated with golden light, like a stage act, near a neon Space Age restaurant.

In contrast, images of Roman-style statues in sunny outdoor settings exude the tranquility of frozen history, with just a hint of kitsch. A shot of a mild-faced marble woman reaching back to touch her quiver of immovable arrows introduces another Diana, the chaste huntress of Roman myth, who saved nymph Daphne from rape by turning her into a laurel tree. A statue of Apollo and Daphne photographed against blue sky near a flashy emporium with a fake Greek pediment presents a sexual struggle remote in time and stylistic convention yet filled with a passion unknown to the stylized routines of the Strip. (BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach, to May 14).