ART REVIEW : Photos From Serious to the Comic : Exhibit: Retrospective of Duane Michals photos show work that is both often entertaining and sometimes powerful.

Perhaps it is just coincidence that the simple title of “The Duane Michals Show” seems more fitting for a comedy hour than a 30-year museum retrospective of a noted New York photographer.

But images of, say, Howdy Doody persist when faced with a blow-up self-portrait of Michals using his head and hands to make a shadow image of a duck on the wall behind him at the entrance to his show at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.

Guileless and often goofy, Michals seems content to leave a first impression of himself as an entertainer in this first American survey of his work. But, as the wide selection of more than 200 black-and-white photographs quickly shows, Michals is much more. A mix of portraits and multi-image narratives with short written texts, this wonderful show combines humor with nostalgia, religious commentary, astute social observation and personal fantasy.

A bluntness and modesty pervades this work, a simplicity that encourages each viewer to go further beyond the surface. To project and extrapolate. To be swept up in the nostalgia, without being trapped in sweetness. To keep an eye on the gimmick inherent to the medium, while still appreciating its enormous power.

An early work sets the tone of surrealist quasi-religious symbolism and photographic manipulation that remains consistent throughout. “The Illuminated Man,” 1968, shows a shadowy man whose head has been transformed into a featureless, glowing flash of light. “I Met God in the Subway,” 1990--the latest here--takes the same theme further: a man is shown riding the New York subway, his head lit from behind to look like a halo. Just below, the artist has written: “I met God in the subway/He looked like you and me/I asked which train went to Heaven/He said take number three./When I got off in Heaven/It looked like Union Square/Seems when you go to Heaven/You don’t go anywhere.”

Constantly questioning reality in art and in life, in both of these works Michals plays the mysterious powers of manipulation available to the photographer against the mysticism of religion. Calling himself a “lapsed Catholic,” Michals has spoken often of his devoutly religious childhood. A sense of paradise lost governs much of his work, imbued with a nostalgia for the transcendent visions that can come through faith.

There is a slightly mocking tone to such quasi-religious work, but it is dryly mixed with the possibility of optimism. That Heaven and Earth are equal, that death does not transcend life.

Born in 1932 in blue-collar McKeesport, Pa., a Pittsburgh suburb that was also the birthplace of Andy Warhol, Michals has made many works that appear directly autobiographical. His unresolved relationship with his father is often a subject, among these one of the most subtle yet most poignant is the 1978 “Self Portrait Shaking Hands with My Father.”

In a barren room, the two men shake hands at the extreme right side of the photo, and the contrast between them is striking. The older man, slightly bent from age, wears a somewhat rumpled suit, a mark of formality that hides the fact that he is a retired factory worker. The younger Michals wears a dark turtleneck, casually formal as would befit an artist. In their handshake is the symbol of resolution, across what appears to be significant distance. An open door at the left of the picture appears as an escape route from these powerful emotions.

Death comes up often in Michals’ work, too, with a sense both of sorrow and curiosity yet never morbidity. Hamlet’s Yorick, for example, is remembered in a memento mori picture of a young man holding a skull. Scrawled below in the artist’s rough hand is a short poem “All things Mellow in the Mind . . .” about the brevity of life. “So Let’s hold tight, and touch and feel,” Michals wrote, “For this quick instant we are real.”

There are lighter moments, too, belying Michals’s Pop background and his links to a post-modern real-life metaphysic that is similar to the work of artists such as John Baldessari and Edward Ruscha, among others.

A group of exquisite celebrity portraits--many of them originally commercial work done for magazines--starts the show. Some are of well-known artists, including a rare pair of portraits of Joseph Cornell, as well as images of Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte. Others are of movie and arts stars: Dennis Hopper lounging on the floor in a cigarette-smoke-filled room, Joe Dallesandro as a gargoyle on a New York rooftop, and a beautiful but apparently narcissistic Russian ballerina Ludmila Tscherina, who is shown just in the circular frame of a hand-held mirror in a photograph from 1964.

And the narrative can be both sweet and borderline cute, like children’s book illustrations: One well-known work shows a child who looks up at a coat and hat hanging on a rack, then falls asleep and dreams the bogey man has come to life.

A series of forays into painting shows the artist painting on top of vintage photographs, obliterating the precious images of photographic masters with colorful childlike imagery. Here, Michals exhibits a bad-boy daring reminiscent of when Robert Rauchenberg erased a Willem DeKooning drawing.

Michals’s 1989 work, too, takes a tongue-in-cheek jab at the pretentions of photography: “There Are Nine Mistakes in This Photograph” shows a man reading an upside-down newspaper with an upside-down top hat on his head, sitting across a breakfast table from a blindfolded girl eating cake, among other foolishness. “Can you find them?” the picture teases.

On the surface, all of Michals’ art seems immediately accessible. A renegade from the seriousness of both fine-art photography and photojournalism, Michals makes it all seem easy. But, again, there is more than meets the eye. Lighting and darkroom techniques often add enormous subtlety to the beauty of the prints. And the exact precision of the artist’s language belies the labor behind both the poetry and the prose.

And Michals is hardly blind to the potential impact of his work. “Someone Left a Message for You,” 1974, shows a hand writing backward on a sheet of paper; the scrawled text revealed progressively over four photographs says “As you read this I am entering your mind.”

No kidding.