Downtown

Anyone who loves the nature photography of Ansel Adams should flip for work by Gus Foster; Foster does what Adams did, only bigger. Using a large format Globus-Holway panoramic camera (of which there are only three in existence), Foster (who lives in Taos, where they know a thing or two about the great outdoors) shoots impossibly vast landscape photos that span a perceptual range of 360 degrees. What that means is that scenes you’d have to swivel your head to see in their entirety in real life are somehow condensed so that you can take them in in a single glance. Visual meditations on time, space, motion and the elements, the six pieces on view here differ significantly in certain respects--Foster journeys from a dead-flat Midwestern wheat field to the ocean breaking on rocky cliffs in Mexico--but are alike in that all resonate with a majesty that borders on the spiritual.

Also on view are Polaroid Sonnegrams by Eve Sonneman which resemble the experimental photography done by the early Surrealists. Most involve black silhouetted figures engaged in high energy activities--kung-fu fighting, golfing, diving--superimposed on images of celestial fields of one sort or another--solar eclipses, the surfaces of distant planets, and so forth. The series is rather flat emotionally and is neither technically impressive nor visually seductive. (Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St.; Foster to Sat., Sonneman to Aug. 20.)