O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Structure Is the Key to Architectural Photography

Many works in ‘Urban Theater’ at Golden West are classics of their kind, particularly as they reflect aspects of Southland life.

Architectural photography is as old as photography itself. Of course, buildings do have a talent for standing still, a boon in the early days of long exposures. More significantly, early daguerreotypes and calotypes enabled a wide audience to marvel at the exotic architecture of distant lands as well as at the details of well-known buildings blurred by sheer familiarity.

In our time, photographs of buildings and sites often have little to do with awe or admiration. At the Fine Arts Gallery at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, the 10 contemporary artists represented in “Architectural Photography: The Urban Theater” (through Nov. 24) tend to view their environments with disillusion, impassivity or quirky personal viewpoints.

Curator Donna Sandrock has interpreted the topic very broadly, with numerous images that have less to do with buildings per se than with particular environments. According to her posted statement, the show was intended to contrast vastly different approaches to architectural imagery, and to point out that architecture is “a primary backdrop” for everyday life, “affecting us almost constantly.”

Although the show does have some lesser material, many of the works are classics of their kind, particularly as they reflect aspects of life in Southern California. The centerpiece is “Long Beach,” Robert Frank’s iconic image of a tarp-covered car parked between two palm trees next to a low-lying stucco building.

Shot on a cross-country car trip in the mid-1950s, the photograph hardly resembles vintage tourist views of Long Beach, which generally focused on the harbor or the Pike Amusement Park.

The image of a car wrapped in a protective garment suggests the great value Californians place on their personal transportation. To see this apparently precious object parked outside a peculiar-looking building of zero architectural distinction is to understand what’s really important to a mobile society.

In 1965 and 1966, when painter Ed Ruscha made his small books of photographs, “Some Los Angeles Apartments” and “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” nobody else considered such utterly banal subject matter fit for an artist’s camera.

Shoot nondescript or downright garish apartment buildings with names like “Le Tiki” and “Fountain Blu”? Photograph every building on a street in a continuous fan-folded series of overlapping images? It’s not as if Sunset Boulevard offered a spectacular or unusual view, or as if the houses had architectural distinction or belonged to famous people.

Ah, but that’s exactly the point.

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Ruscha was making a catalogue of a chunk of the real world precisely because it was there, and hardly anybody was paying close attention. Today, we’ve become almost nostalgic about the mishmash of styles typical of the city (the sight of mansard roofs, cupolas, Ionic columns, stucco boxes and International Style facades all snuggled up together), and many have written and photographed them.

But in the mid-’60s, Ruscha’s images captured the Pop Art aesthetic in its quietly laid-back Southern California form, a wry acknowledgment that we live in a place where issues of taste yield to pragmatism, hucksterism and tolerance for many forms of expression. (It was probably no coincidence that in 1966 architect Robert Venturi published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” a famous early defense of the vagaries of vernacular styles.)

During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Lewis Baltz was also looking at ordinary things no one else was noticing. In black-and-white photographs including “Laguna Niguel,” “Laguna Beach” and “Corona del Mar,” Baltz offered flatly neutral images of stucco walls enlivened only by drain pipes, window openings and cheap electric lights. It hardly matters in which towns these scenes were shot, since they seem interchangeable.

Baltz downplayed abstract and textural qualities that would have been prime material for a modernist photographer of city sights, such as Aaron Siskind. Although Baltz’s images do reflect an aesthetic of extreme minimalism, his shots are much more about the anonymity, banality and faint cheesiness that marks contemporary life in the not-quite-suburbs of Orange County and other “edge cities.”

Similarly, while modernist photographers (such as Edward Weston or Ansel Adams) photographed the land so as to emphasize its sensuousness, fecundity or grandeur, postmodern artists have different agendas.

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Baltz went on to photograph flimsy construction and scattered debris at building sites for cut-rate condos, dump sites and similar anti-landscapes. These images (not in the show) also reflected his view of displacement and banality as prime aspects of contemporary life.

In a different vein, just under the dispassionate surfaces of Joe Deal’s images of the late ‘70s and ‘80s is a tight-lipped view of the heedless way people erect their petty structures, as if landscape were a marginal commodity and housing developments were a sacred gift.

In “Puente Hills, California” from Deal’s “Portfolio: Sideviews,” the fine-grained texture of a ridge of bare earth gives way to a smog-wrapped city vista of nondescript, low-lying buildings. A view of Baldwin Hills from “Portfolio: The Fault Zone” shows a row of banal suburban homes unceremoniously backed up to a dry hillside.

Laurie Brown, who studied with Baltz, is represented in the show by an untitled pair of photographs from 1979 of tracts of earth crisscrossed with tire marks. In these extremely low-key images, Brown takes the long view, regarding the bulldozed land simply as one stage of an epic chain of actions in the evolution of the Earth.

Other photographers in the show impose a deliberately theatrical vision on a particular place, either by finding bizarre-looking sights or by manipulating the film in the camera or after it is developed.

John Divola’s “Zuma Beach” series of color photographs offer sharp contrasts of calm, eternal nature with willful, fleeting human activity. A vandalized beach house littered with broken glass, spray paint and furniture shards becomes a stage set on which the serene seascape visible through the windows plays a central role. In one of these images, the spar-like piece of furniture that rises up against the sea gives the house the air of a frantic lifeboat.

In his “Night Walker” series, Jerry Burchfield dressed up ordinary nighttime sights in Orange County with a delirious, let’s-pretend aura.

A pair of preternaturally green palm trees seem to be shimmying in sympathy with the zigzag motif on a yellow building facade. A phone booth outside a motel glows in primary colors, a luscious beacon for the homesick traveler. A ground-floor window in an ordinary suburban house glows with a huge “atomic” fireball that is probably just a table lamp.

Karl Gernot Kuehn’s black-and-white nocturnal scenes blending fragments of the Los Angeles urban scene give the city an over-the-top apocalyptic aura--as if it were a player on some global movie set. In “Depot,” a stairway rises to nowhere, a wall of graffiti is encroached by a menacing shadow and a toppled concrete block campily portends the fall of a civilization.

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William Clift’s architectural photographs are the exception in this show. He lingers lovingly on ornate or homely surfaces--a delicately detailed 19th-Century skylight, a sober log cabin--to capture delicate nuances of light and dark.

Rooted in a reverence for handiwork, Clift’s approach emphasizes the act of seeing, a first step in the understanding of how our immediate environments reflect and color our personalities and priorities.

* “Architectural Photography: The Urban Theater” remains through Nov. 24 at the Fine Arts Gallery, Golden West College, 15744 Golden West St., Huntington Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday; also 6 to 9 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Admission: Free. Parking: Gothard Street lot. (714) 895-8356.