Wilshire Center

Not quite a household word in photography but a master of his trade, the late W. Eugene Smith offered a brutal insight into man’s highest and lowest moments. His technique could be as flashy and obvious as a calling card (“Empire State Building at Midnight”) or tempered to a grainy, blink-of-a-second in time (“Three Men Hugging, Andrea Doria”). Remarkably, these photos--mostly from the ‘50s--ferret out weighty content in the most everyday places.

Angle-featured, sinuous and dramatic as a late Michelangelo figure, a yarn spinner sits on a sidewalk in Spain, her body rising gracefully as she bites a coil of thread free from her finished spool. Adding light to the face so it seems illuminated by a celestial shaft, Smith makes “Spinner” an unsentimental ode to feminine grace and resilience.

Smith likes to maneuver high contrast values that in “Spanish Wake” start to look the tenebrism of Georges de La Tour. No pictorialist out to make photography ape painting, Smith harnesses dramatic light for an emotional punch. There’s plenty of that in an aged Charlie Chaplin in clown’s paint staring blankly, almost tragically into space; the ebony face of a weeping black child, and a pair of glistening black hands visible through the stark geometry of a stockade.

When Smith was in his teens his father committed suicide; Smith was later seriously injured while documenting World War II. Though he can be lighthearted, even naughty (“Women Dancing” and “Climax Street”), this is an artist who knows pain. Perhaps that’s why he was able to give it such poetry. (Stephen White Gallery, 7319 Beverly Blvd., to Oct. 29.)