SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Photography as Art : Galleries in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties are showing a variety of works that illustrate the medium.

As if by some divine design, photography has descended on galleries from Camarillo to Santa Barbara. Whereas fine art photography is still fairly marginal in the ranks of exhibited media, it’s currently possible to get a broad sense of what the medium is all about just by gallery-hopping in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

At first blush, Robert Glenn Ketchum’s work, now at the Carnegie Museum, seems to be directly out of the landscape tradition. His big, bold Cibachrome prints veritably vibrate with color and plainly let nature rear its beautiful head.

Ketchum studied at Brooks Institute and CalArts in the early ‘70s and now has a burgeoning reputation. He is a purist who likes to present his landscapes full frame and without technical alteration/adulteration. Nonetheless, he brings a unique approach to the strongest images in this show.

Notable is Ketchum’s triptych from his recent “CVNRA” series (Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, from his book “Overlooked in America: The Success and Failure of Federal Land Management,” Aperture, 1991. Here, an average, “uneventful” field speckled with a few bright flowers amid the dry brush becomes a rich compositional adventure.

The water in “Mendenhall Lake” is dreamily glassy, fringed by a curtain of trees and with the composition centered around a boulder in the lake. Elsewhere, he seizes the moments when the sun peeks through clouds to create uneven dispersals of light on the subjects--a kind of accidental, natural chiaroscuro effect.

In an implicit but persuasive way, Ketchum’s work is grounded in environmental activism. He takes the stance that without our continuing appreciation of nature, in both its small incarnations as well as its more dramatic displays, the defoliation of the earth will continue.

In stark contrast to Ketchum, Santa Barbara photographer Woody Wooden’s work, upstairs in the Carnegie Museum, is everything but pure. Wooden has been known for his images of lightning-riddled skies, but has been recently making three-dimensional photo constructions and assemblages.

With his works, Wooden has been veering ever closer to reality, combining cut-out photographic images, hand-tinting and actual objects--rusty nails, dollar bills, pills. This way, the concrete and the reproduced are cobbled together.

At the Heritage Fine Art gallery in Camarillo, the sole focus of ex- photojournalist Bill Kobrin’s prints are his behind-the-scenes shots, on assignment with The Associated Press, from the set of “The Seven Year Itch.”

Kobrin shot the famous scene in which Marilyn Monroe’s pleated white skirt reaches for the sky when a sudden gust of wind comes up from a subway vent. His other shots frame the legendary shoot, depicting her skirt in varying stages of rest and arrest.

Reportedly, the spirits of onlookers also rose and fell in sync with the motions of the skirt as director Billy Wilder shot take after take. Her then-husband Joe DiMaggio, stumbling onto the scene, was none too amused.

At the risk of over-analyzing, Kobrin’s shots provoke thought beyond mere kitsch and titillation. That breeze could symbolize the movie-going America’s objectifying hunger in the face of Monroe’s sexual mythology.

These photos, as a series, capture and expand on what has become a kind of Great Moment in American Culture.

“Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography,” at the SBMA, is an ambitious show curated by Karen Sinsheimer, curator of Photography magazine.

The exhibition, well-stocked with familiar images and also obscurities, makes a reasonable connection between the rise of the state of art photography in the mid to late 1800s and the boom in the state of California around the same time. Both the medium and the state shared status as new frontiers, teeming with promise.

Carleton Watkins’ 19th-Century views of the state are priceless, as is Edward Muybridge’s “San Francisco Panorama” of 1877. Edward Weston turned nature into abstract poetry. George Hurrell’s glossy portraits of Hollywood luminaries and Dorothea Lange’s migrant worker portraits also play their rightful roles in the saga of the sunshine state.

When in Santa Barbara, also swing by these photo shows: Jay Dunitz’s metallic paintings/photographs at Brooks Institute, Jefferson campus; at the Channing Peak Gallery in the County Administration Building, the work of four photographers who shot in Siberia as part of an exchange program; and “The Great Wall of Granada,” photographic images projected on the back wall of the Granada Theater tonight and tomorrow at 7 p.m.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “Guardianship of Nature: The Photography of Robert Glenn Ketchum,” and work by Woody Wooden, at the Carnegie Art Museum, 424 S. C St. in Oxnard through May 3.

* Bill Kobrin’s images of Marilyn Monroe during the shooting of “The Seven Year Itch,” at Heritage Fine Art Gallery, 596-C Mobil Ave. in Camarillo.

* “Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. through May 31.