PHOTO REVIEW : 2 Ways of Viewing La Jolla Exhibit of Monsen Collection

A sailing brig plies the huge but glassy sea as the sun shines on part of the scene through banks of soft, gray clouds.

Next to this image is another gorgeous photograph: puffy ranks of clouds that sail above a choppy, glistening Golden Gate seaway. The first portrayal is Frenchman Gustave Le Gray’s 1856 camera-made seascape, “Brig Upon the Water.” The latter was made scores of years later in another world by another artist, Ansel Adams.

“It was so beautiful, I had to have it,” collector Joseph Monsen said of the Adams print. Monsen also acquired the Le Gray because he “knew this was the most famous photograph of the day. It won all the gold medals,” he said, and “Le Gray turned out to be one of the greatest artists in early photography.”

Now both, along with 115 others are on view in “150 Years of Photographic Ideas: Selections from the Monsen Collection” at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art through April 2.

Monsen, a university professor, who lives part of the year in Seattle and part in La Jolla, says the 117-piece exhibit amounts to only about 5% of his collection. Two other exhibitions from his collection are running simultaneously in Seattle.

Even so, the La Jolla display features superior examples by many of the great names in photography: Carleton Watkins, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Edward Steichen, Alfred Steiglitz and Margaret Cameron. Contemporary artists are also represented: Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, the Starn Twins and Duane Michals.

However, Monsen said, the organization of the display by Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla museum, has stirred some surprising controversy among museum professionals because the photographs are not arranged in chronological order or by subject matter.

Instead, Davies has juxtaposed images of similar subjects photographed over the years by different artists. Up to a point, this tack reveals the creative and visual processes of different artists at work.

Three views of marsh landscapes are easy to follow. Roger Fenton, Queen Victoria’s official photographer, has a classically pastoral 1860 landscape of a lowland scene, similar to Peter Emerson’s 1888 “Rushy Shore.” Contrasted with these is Harry Callahan’s darkly romantic 1958 picture of wild grasses.

Two photographs of Egypt’s pyramids reveal how conditions there have drastically changed. In 1858, Francis Frith exposed a glass negative that shows only three nomads on the vast desert expanse near a pyramid.

In 1967, Eugene Omar Goldbeck captured crowds of visitors and tour buses arriving at the pyramids and the Sphinx in a panoramic black and white view.

But Davies, according to a brochure on the exhibit, also sets up more complex juxtapositions, in which the viewer is supposed to reach conclusions on social or political issues. Trying to make the connections can easily distract the viewer’s attention from the exceptional photography Davies has gathered.

A more rewarding approach might be to concentrate on individual photographs and not worry about the relationships between images.

Monsen started collecting wooden Chinese and Japanese sculpture in 1958, and graduated to photography in 1968.

“I want beautiful pictures, but I’m also interested in the ideas behind the pictures,” Monsen said. He is also driven as a collector by “the exhilaration of searching for a piece--the search, the hunt.”

The La Jolla exhibit fills five galleries. One gallery is mostly 19th-Century landscapes. Another room is devoted chiefly to images of boys, women and cityscapes. A hallway is ranked with portraits from different periods.

One dominant photograph is Tina Barney’s large color image of a 1984 graduation day at a prep school. The fresh, almost life-sized faces of the eight girls wearing white cotton dresses with blue sashes are a picture of youthful innocence.

“That doesn’t work in a snapshot size,” Monsen said, commenting on how different photos “work” at different sizes. Vito Acconci’s series of 12 snaps made each time he blinked walking down a New York street, are not very artistic, but that’s not why Monsen bought them.

Acconci took the pictures to document a performance art piece years ago. Monsen bought the images because he wanted works “on the edge of photography, the cusp. I felt it was important to the collection to document the fringes, the edges of what’s going on in photography,” he said.

However, Monsen says he has to feel comfortable with the prints he buys. He searched for four or five years before settling on a piece by former San Diegan John Baldessari. “I didn’t want pictures of people lying dead or shot,” Monsen said.

Baldessari’s large black-and-white and color piece Titled “Eye lid (with log),” is a collage made from a number of closely cropped images, some taken from movies, of men’s and women’s faces, and a log. The internal juxtaposition of people in dress attire and others from an apparently wartime scene makes an arresting artwork.

A nearby New York City street-corner scene by artist William Klein bristles with urban energy.

A misleading 1927 Harlem group portrait by early black photographer James Van de Zee is among a mixture of portraits in the museum’s hall. Close examination reveals that the sexes are reversed. The rank of well-dressed “men” standing behind a row of seated “women” are actually women, and the women, wearing tailored suits and nylons, are men.

The museum appears to have made an effort to link the Monsen exhibit with its other show, a retrospective of Texas artist Vernon Fisher. Fisher’s painted sculpture on “space and volume,” which shows erosion, matches up with Asahel Curtis’ adjacent 1910 photograph of the leveling of Seattle hills by developers.

One wonders whether another piece, Fisher’s camera obscura, was mere serendipity or planned. Today’s camera was, after all, named for the Latin camera (chamber) obscura (dark)--a room with a small hole in the wall that allowed an outside image to be projected against the opposite wall. In its simplest form, that’s what a camera is.

At one end of the Monsen collection exhibit, Fisher’s camera obscura projects a stunning upside down image--just as a camera does--of the street and coastline behind the museum. It is so unexpected that some visitors mistake the moving images for a film.

In its organization, “150 Years of Photographic Ideas” may be too clever for its own good. But, if you want a history of photography, from the beauty of the early days to the drama of the present, this exhibit has it all.