Reaping the Rewards of ‘Avarice’ : Art: In a year and a half as head of LACMA’s photo department, Robert Sobieszek has added 400 works to the collection. Some are on display in ‘New Acquisitions.’

Robert Sobieszek has been busy in the year and a half since he took charge of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s photography department. An exhibit, “New Acquisitions, New Work, New Directions: Photography From the Collection,” on display through July 26, shows he has had a major impact on the museum’s photography collection.

LACMA owned about 2,700 photographs upon Sobieszek’s arrival. Now that number has grown by nearly 400--about one photograph for every working day since he resigned as director of photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and joined the staff at LACMA.

How did he do it?

By indulging in greed.

“Curating is the only socially acceptable form of avarice,” Sobieszek said.

But where did he get the money in this period of perpetual belt-tightening?

“I’m merciless. I beg shamelessly,” he said.

Indeed, about 300 of the 400 acquisitions are gifts, the largest being a wide-ranging donation of 100 works from the Sid and Diana Avery Trust. Among examples on view are a 1949 photograph from Harry Callahan’s poignant series of pictures of his wife, Eleanor, and Alfred Cheney Johnston’s 1924 photograph of film star Norma Shearer.

Other evidence of generosity includes David Hockney’s “Sunday Morning, Mayflower Hotel, New York, 1982,” a large Polaroid montage donated by Roger R. Smith; Sarah Charlesworth’s “Figures Diptych” (equating an evening gown worn by Marlene Dietrich with a bound figure), presented by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation; and Moira Adams and Martin Steele’s gift of works by Leland Rice and Larry Fink.

When it comes to photographs purchased by Sobieszek, the Ralph M. Parsons Fund (founder of the museum’s photography department) and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation (provider of a $35,000 challenge grant for acquisitions) are the sources of funds most frequently cited on exhibition labels. But the show reveals that the museum has received help from many friends in the field of photography.

Collecting is an ongoing activity at LACMA, of course, so the exhibition is a progress report rather than a conclusion. But Sobieszek is pleased with his achievement to date. “I did what I set out to do,” he said.

The challenge was to fill fundamental lacks in the fledgling collection--ranging from 19th-Century Daguerreotypes to Diane Arbus’ images of human oddities from the 1960s--while building depth in the period since World War II and acquiring great images of recent vintage by such artists as Cindy Sherman, Eileen Cowin, Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, Sobieszek said. “We want to have a vital, energized, responsive collection of photographic art in all of its varied technical aspects and visions. If it’s photographic, photo-derived or photo-mechanical, it’s fair game,” he said, noting that some of his acquisitions bear little resemblance to traditional photographs.

“I’m less interested in photography than in artists who use photography,” Sobieszek said. “It’s incumbent upon a curator to do the best you can to understand the issues artists are dealing with, and, by your selections, to mirror what’s going on out there.” That means engaging in an ongoing education. “Sometimes you have to throw up your hands and ask a lot of questions. It’s part of the learning curve,” he said.

Sobieszek’s acquisition plan was complicated, so he divided the territory and drew up four shopping lists, for 19th-Century work, early 20th-Century photographs, important work since World War II and up-to-the-minute photographic art, he said. While he had no quota for women or minorities, Sobieszek consciously considered a wide range of work and beefed up the museum’s collection in those chronically under-represented areas.

The exhibition of about 100 photographs reflects his success, but they are not displayed as so many trophies. Instead, the images are arranged thematically in four galleries. The first room presents relatively traditional, black-and-white photography by such artists as Eikoh Hosoe, William Klein and Lee Friedlander. While the subject matter varies widely, neighboring pictures often pose striking likenesses or comparisons, as in Sebastiao Salgado’s and Jock Sturges’ mother-and-child images.

The territory of photography opens up dramatically in the second gallery, featuring landscapes. Here visitors will find such unconventional works as Hamish Fulton’s “Water,” which corresponds to a walk he took across Baffin Island, and Adam Fuss’ rippled blue photogram, made by placing a sheet of printing paper at the bottom of a tray of water and exposing it to light while agitating the water.

Portraits are the subject of the third gallery, but here again the definition of the genre is stretched to include current interpretations. Tina Barney’s large, vividly colored work, “Jill and the TV,” seems less a portrait of a specific woman than a knowing view of privileged alienation in the age of electronic media. Maria Martinez-Canas, a Cuban in exile, declares that her home is in her work in an abstract self-portrait, “Aqui Estare” (I will stand here).

In the final gallery, color goes wild and photographs take on the proportions of large paintings as artists push photography’s conceptual and formal limits. Ellen Brooks, for example, has enlarged a landscape photograph from a magazine to produce a contemporary version of Pointillism.

Sobieszek said he has emphasized acquisitions of American photography so far, but he plans to broaden the museum’s representation of European photographs in the future. Shopping and soliciting gifts don’t consume all his time, however. He is currently working on a book, “Robert Smithson: The Photo Works,” to be published in the fall of 1993.