Wilshire Center

San Francisco photographer Ruffin Cooper is known for his fascination with monumental cultural icons such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and the Louvre. His large-scale photo constructions in the “Museum in Construction” series get behind the scenes, so to speak, to break down the monumentality of these cultural altars into simple ideas about building structure. Photos of the buildings-in-progress are mounted on a Frank Stella jumble of sharp, jutting aluminum shapes and occasionally covered in colored thick oil paint. Pieces of construction rebar, red-striped hazard tape and chain link fence integrated into the assemblage stress the underlying structural premise while adding a dose of reality to the photo documentation game.

Watching culture build from the bottom up in the construction of major museums is a semantic sport that takes a different turn in the “Firenze” series. These are large haphazard montage images made of other pictures, slides and transparencies of architectural details dumped from a photographer’s files. Space vies with image, black and white competes with color. We can reconstruct a photographer’s choices and instructions that culminate in the final image. It’s a subtle, self-referential insight into the building of a photograph as complete as the more physical construction of a bridge or any other structure that makes ideas real. (G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 7224 Melrose Ave., to Dec. 17.)