ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Walk Through Smooth ‘Terrains’ : Laurie Brown’s Photos Look at Landscapes and Development in Shades of Gray

In the 1860s, the Union Pacific Railroad hired photographer Andrew Joseph Russell to document the construction of the transcontinental railroad. One of his bleak documentary views shows the tracks cutting through a Godforsaken, rock-strewn embankment somewhere west of Cheyenne, Wyo.

Since the late 1970s, Laguna Beach resident Laurie Brown has been making similarly austere black-and-white photographs of contemporary landscape in transition in Orange County and elsewhere in the American West.

A sampling of images from her “Recent Terrains” series are at Orange Coast College Photo Gallery--actually, it’s more like a Photo Hallway--through Thursday.

In these self-effacing yet quietly luminous photographs, Brown records the evolution of tracts of land plowed up for developments in Laguna Hills, Aliso Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita and Temecula. Her images are the documents of an observant but self-effacing bystander, combining a delicate feel for tonal contrasts and pleasing compositions with a cool objectivity. Frustratingly for some viewers, her interest in the land is not specifically concerned with the pros and cons of development.

One Laguna Hills view shows a wide, flat terrain spiked with big clods of dirt, tractor marks and a wispy, narrow dirt road under a pale gray sky. Another image of Laguna Hills shows pairs of skinny poles stuck in the earth to cradle newly planted saplings across a brand-new street from the wooden skeletons of a housing development.

Yet another view of the area shows a cluster of tract homes nestled under a swoop of telephone lines and a sidewalk that butts up against a line of sandbags. Delicate blacks and grays delineate the dirt hills that keep the area poised between nowhere-land and civilization.

In the 19th Century, photographers of the American West conveyed the triumphal conquest of the land of opportunity. Sold in portfolios to wealthy and wistful city slickers, the awesome mountain views were unabashed tributes to God’s work. The photographs of the 1860s and ‘70s also served as factual documents--whether paid for by a railroad company, the U.S. government or local chambers of commerce--of land available for cultivation, settlement, logging and mining. Yet, although unbounded admiration of the landscape existed in tandem with financial speculation, the photographs themselves were not consciously about that clash of interests.

In contrast, contemporary American photographers seeking out new vistas inevitably employ a strong dose of irony. While the landscape has shrunk and suffered untold damages, photographers themselves have become increasingly skeptical of the influence and abuse of political and commercial interests.

In the close-knit photography world, it is significant that Brown (who went on to earn a master of fine arts degree at Cal State Fullerton) took a beginning photography class taught at Orange Coast by Lewis Baltz.

The year she took his class (1972), he published a series of black-and-white photographs of an Orange County housing site under construction (“Tract Houses”) that would mark a new genre of landscape photography.

His stark, unpopulated photographs document the intersection of landscape and real estate at the anonymous, largely ignored outer limits of Western cities. Conceived as part of a series to undercut the dominance of any one view, these images dispassionately reveal the upheaval, waste, shoddiness and inhuman bleakness that is (as Baltz said recently) “the result of a very complex and not always generous set of social relations.”

In contrast, Brown’s landscapes convey an almost Zen-like calm. The hills and earth in these views retain a pristine (if coolly unemotional) beauty and even the architectural monotony of a Rancho Santa Margarita development looks almost welcoming, bathed in the crisp light-and-shade contrasts of the late-afternoon sun.

Brown writes in a posted introduction to these images that she is interested in “that brief window of time” between the digging that exposes the “substance and layers of the earth” and their transformation into bedrock for “the structures of civilization.” But this explanation seems a bit too grandiose. More simply, her images reveal a very patient and generous curiosity about land in transition--a close view of a “wilderness” that normally seems utterly boring and featureless.

Although Brown’s work usually incorporates two or more images (different views of the same site, or contrasting views of different sites), the recent photographs are lone panoramic views. Her new emphasis on the single image reinforces the old-fashioned aura of a benign, all-seeing perspective on the evolution of landscape.

The panorama view, in particular, harks back to photography in the pre-cinema era, when the horizontal format simulated the experience of peripheral vision in nature, the roaming eye of an explorer on a mountaintop.

Working in a lonely gap between traditional landscape photography and edgier, polemical work, Brown has an uncanny ability to find elements of grace in unpromising surroundings and a refreshingly dogged belief that unexplored territories will always exist somewhere, if you know where to find them.

“Laurie Brown: Recent Terrains” continues through Thursday at Orange Coast College Photo Gallery, Fine Arts Building, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Gallery hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Free. (714) 432-5524.