PHOTO REVIEW : Exhibit Reveals Black Experience in San Diego : Photography: More than 50 photos in the downtown Lyceum Theatre provide a varied and realistic look at the lives of African-Americans.

It would be easy to simply look at “Images of Black San Diego: A Cultural Experience” as just another art show. This group of more than 50 photographs hanging in the lobby of the Lyceum Theatre in Horton Plaza is the recent work of one man, Lorenzo Gunn. And, like many art shows, it focuses on a coherent body of work on a single subject: San Diego’s African-American community.

But if you look at this work simply as art, studying the artist’s point of view, his skill as a photographer, his vision of the world, you could as easily miss out on the whole point of the show.

It seems especially pertinent that the title of this show omits the artist’s name. Gunn, the artist, is secondary to his subjects here. This is a show about a side of San Diego that many of us rarely see. It is a journalistic view into a totally black world.

What we see are black professionals, black families, black students, black children and some street folks. . . . ordinary black people going about their daily lives. All of them remain anonymous, there are no titles on any of the works. We are left to believe that these people are typical, noteworthy because of the larger picture of a community that they represent, different from the criminals, gang members and drug victims that so often characterize the African-American community.

More than just snapshots, Gunn shows us a side of daily life that is important to remember. He shows us a world of tightly knit families, of ambitious people, of people having fun, enjoying each other.

They are significant because they are so regular, and if they were not black, then most of us who are not black would find them utterly familiar. This portrait is not particularly remarkable, but it is insightful: It is one San Diegan’s attempt to create a mini update statement about one side of San Diego.

The impact of Gunn’s work comes not from the way he depicts his subjects--which, for the most part, is usually pretty straightforward, without much artistic bent--but rather from the fact he has attempted to create a full picture of a subject that remains unfamiliar to many of us.

Gunn, who is black, has entered into the private moments of these people’s lives. He appears to have had a comfortable relationship with his subjects. Gunn shows their humanity, he makes them seem warm, alive and knowable. And, more often than not, he successfully gives us a sense of their lives.

Among the most striking sequences is one of the birth of a baby. Gunn convinced the doctor, a woman, and the couple--whom the photographer did not know before photographing them--to allow him to document the birth process.

We see the couple and their physician in the operating room at the moment the baby is being delivered. In the intensity of this excruciatingly emotional instant, the father’s concern and the mother’s peaceful concentration are completely revealed. They are oblivious to the camera, and the intimacy of their relationship becomes utterly clear.

Moments later, their concern has turned to joy in a picture showing the crying child lifted triumphantly by the doctor. The sequence reaches its anticlimax, however, when Gunn shows the doctor posing as she leaves the hospital.

In other pictures, Gunn takes us into a jazz club, a record store, a radio station, a law office, a boxing ring, a pool hall. He shows what appears to be a graduation ceremony and even a street-corner hangout. And though his portraits are sometimes overly stiff, the variety of the subjects gives a sense of breadth to the composite picture he has created.

Gunn was commissioned to make this body of work by San Diego’s African American Museum of Fine Arts, and the selections in this show were made by photographer Carrie Mae Weems, an artist of national reputation who teaches in Oakland.