ART REVIEWS : Strand’s Labor of Love: Working-Class People : Exhibition: Photographer captures images of man’s timeless dignity on his travels around the world.

Paul Strand was not the sort of photographer likely to shoot a guy with his guard down. He was too high-minded for that. For him, the “straight,” unretouched photograph championed by Alfred Stieglitz in the early 1900s offered a direct passageway into a person’s soul, and he wasn’t going to blow his chances by carelessly choosing a moment when the soul wasn’t shining through clearly.

No matter where his travels took him--born in New York in 1890, he sojourned in New Mexico, Mexico, New England, Luzzara (in Northern Italy) and the Outer Hebrides in Scotland--he found sturdy, presumably honest, working-class people and sturdy, honest dwelling places. In the gorgeous tonal richness of Strand’s gelatin silver and platinum prints from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, every person and every humble setting assumes a timeless dignity.

A boy in Tenancingo, Mexico, stands proudly on a step, his arm curving over his seated mother, who muses in soulful detachment. A door latch in Vermont, cobbled from rough, unpainted wood and old-fashioned square nails, is revealed as an unwitting paradigm of formal values. The piercing gaze of a wiry, mustached Luzzara cobbler in rolled-up shirt sleeves conveys the passionate life force of the “little man.” A barefoot Scottish youth with a prominent hole in his shirt sleeve and a beaten look in his hunched shoulders stands in front of an unforgiving wall of stone.

In contrast to the art-for-art’s-sake posture of Stieglitz’s circle, Strand was influenced by the social activism of colleagues working in theater and film. He contributed to a documentary about organized labor (“Native Land”) and co-authored a book on Luzzara with Cesare Zavattini, screenwriter for Vittorio De Sica’s landmark Neorealist film, “The Bicycle Thief.”

And yet, to a contemporary sensibility, there is something over-refined about Strand’s approach. It is as if his subjects were scissored out of the humdrum flux of their lives to pose as characters in an epic drama of Strand’s own creation. No images could be less candid than these, which makes it seem very odd that Strand used a concealed lens in his Graflex to fool people into thinking he wasn’t focusing on them. Who are these people when they aren’t in dreamy repose or brave confrontation with a camera lens? We’ll never know.

A few photographs in the show are of natural vistas without any evidence of human presence--except, of course, the hyper-refined aestheticism of the photographer. “White Horse,” an image of an animal with the brilliant, hard luster of marble seen against the black slope of a mountain under a dark sky, is surely one of the most breathtakingly lovely of these sights.

The J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, to Nov. 25.

Oddball Organizations: Hearing that someone is the latest hot young Los Angeles artist to be recognized by the national art press is enough to set off a critic’s hype-detector alarm. But it’s easy to understand why others have found Greg Colson’s assemblages so appealing. They combine the aw-shucks warmth of functional castoff objects with evidence of the artist’s homespun labor and signs of a conceptualist’s mind at work.

Most of these pieces have to do with the systems we use to organize everyday experiences--like the chart labeling the seating areas in a sports stadium, a map of a city’s streets, the “four food groups” of nutrition lore, or even the different pattern shapes that must be cut out separately and sewn together to make a dress. Colson reproduces each of these systems in painstaking yet crudely rendered detail--with hand-lettering on pasted bits of paper, tiny paintings or inked rubber stamps--on shabby, humdrum objects.

In “Tacoma,” the names of streets and natural features of Tacoma, Wash., are rubber-stamped on the curving bottom of an old metal basin. The disjunction between the geographic information and the awkward--and not exactly topographical--shape of the basin draws attention to the repetition of key words (point, view) and the eccentric shape formed by the layout of these landmarks. Colson has made several pieces dealing with maps as the record of the piecemeal way residents gain access to different parts of a locality over time.

“Food Groups” consists of tiny paintings--they look like brightly colored children’s paper stickers--of food (a wheel of cheese, a sliced loaf of bread) scattered over two mail boxes and a metal lunch box. In this context, it seems entirely logical that the metal boxes might also be part of another arbitrary yet blandly down-to-earth system. Like . . . metal containers whose contents sustain human beings?

Sweetly oddball as the work is, it still seems in search of a more rigorous and revealing way of mapping and remarking upon the methods we use to make order out of chaos.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, to Sat.

‘X’ Marks the Spot: French artist Marie Bourget’s wall-mounted installation, “X Positions X,” looks like a cross between modular furniture displayed in a chi-chi home decor catalogue and a group of stick figures made from Colorforms. Each of the six groupings consists of four gleaming metal table bases in strict verticals and horizontals and a pair of table tops in matte black and shiny blue.

The black squares seem to represent bodies, the table legs--variously arranged in strict verticals and horizontals--are arms and legs, and the red squares are objects that interact with the figures. The ensemble--which may be assembled into pieces of furniture--has a brightly energetic Constructivist look. But the thinking behind it remains elusive. Is the artist suggesting a basic kinship between the malleability of human beings and the easy rearrangement of objects that serve them?

Bourget’s first U.S. exhibit also includes “Transformer”--a brightly painted hinged metal box on a white metal platform--and a series of six “Tableaux.” They are identical wood-framed wooden images of house facades, each labeled with a different “negative” adjective (vacant, inattentive, preoccupied , and so on). One hopes that the artist’s idea is more complex and distinctive than simply comparing dwelling places to the human mind.

Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to Nov. 10.