La Cienega

N eutrality is the watchword of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth, three young German photographers who dispassionately take in the passing scene. Ruff and Struth’s subject is architecture; Ruff’s images are of people in public spaces. His photographs are large, crisply executed, open-ended, non-judgmental catalogues of subjects and situations that can be found in contemporary urban society.

This enterprise is indebted to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s massive photo-documentation of German industrial buildings. The younger generation seemingly has challenged itself to create equally sober, impersonal, uninflected documents using large formats and--on occasion--color film.

In Struth’s black-and-white images of apartments, banks and other buildings in European cities, skies are bleached white and there is no visible human presence. The fanatic clarity and Sunday-morning stillness of these views allow you to ponder such details as the disposition of the blinds in apartment windows or the patterns in which people have parked their cars. Not glorified in any way, these buildings are oddly idealized by virtue of their seeming removal from the bustle of daily life.

A trio of Ruff’s very large exterior views of houses is oriented in a squarely frontal manner. Shot in Cibachrome, each view nevertheless contains only the most severely limited palette: gray skies, green grass, white curtains. The very clarity of these views--utterly devoid of people, with only rudimentary signs of residential life--gives them a curious transparency. They are as plain, and invisible, as the nose on your face.

Gursky, who also works in Cibachrome, looks at the way people (and animals) arrange themselves in open settings--whether they be students lounging on a university terrace, people at a tennis court in Paris or hens in a field. These are social groups seen as dispassionately as bacteria on laboratory slides or the bits of constantly reconfiguring glass in a kaleidoscope. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to Oct. 7.)