Wilshire Center

You look at the staring eyes of Buchenwald inmates in a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White and you can’t remember ever being so stricken by the horror of the death camps. You look at Marion Post Wolcott’s photograph of a black tenant farmer bending over a table to talk to a pinch-faced cotton buyer in a striped, vested suit and you can easily imagine the tone of the dialogue.

If there is any truth to the notion that women have special gifts for intuition and empathy, such images surely would be trotted out as proof. They are part of an extensive exhibit of work by women photographers active in the 1920s and ‘30s. Not everyone is famous, but discoveries are part of the fun. All but a couple of the prints are vintage.

Six of the women were students of Clarence White, the romantic pictorialist who taught at Columbia University before opening his own school of photography in New York. In common with White’s other notable students, they sooner or later turned away from his soft-focus approach to embrace the clean, sharp style of the jazz age, retaining his lessons in design and composition.

Wynn Richards, who worked in commercial photography, is represented both by a dreamy, luminous still life of flowers and a parasol, and by a sharply geometric shot of a place setting. Dorothea Lange’s shot of a big-bellied woman in a mismatched outfit standing with her hand to her face--her humorous eyes looking at something we can’t see--offers another side to the grimness of her celebrated Dust Bowl images.

A man’s eye peeking through the notch in his collar is an unusually playful subject for Doris Ulmann, better known for her warm, respectful images of life in Appalachia. Laura Gilpin’s infuses a glimpse of a corner of a building in the Mexican sunset with a stately tonal richness. Margaret Watkins’ seated nude offers a private terrain of curves and creases.

Others in the show include: Berenice Abbott, whose early interest in portraiture gave way to sharply detailed views of New York architecture; sharp-eyed street photographer Helen Levitt; Lisette Model, who was entranced by the homely aspects of boulevard life; and Tina Modotti, whose image of the curled hands of a puppeteer holds its own with the contemporaneous work of her mentor and lover Edward Weston. (Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 6.)