ART : PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW : What Only a Stranger Can See : A San Diego show features works from a batch of gifted immigrants who saw us with different eyes, changing the way we see ourselves.

Sometimes, a society’s outsiders have the capacity to see what its insiders can’t--or won’t. Unblinded by familiarity and routine, which can render invisible the everyday events, sensations and practical knowledge accumulated during a lifetime of habit and ritual, outsiders also bring with them their own distinctive experiences, as unexpected frames of reference.

This idea of the unusually perceptive outsider, alienated from society but able to operate with unusual insight into it, has often been used to describe the activity of artists--especially 20th century artists. When the artist is also an immigrant who has chosen to leave behind the social milieu of one country in order to explore life within another, the potential for resonance doubles. A gifted immigrant might see us with new and different eyes, in the process changing the way we see ourselves.

This is the provocative premise behind a compelling exhibition recently opened at the Museum of Photographic Arts here, the third in an important trilogy of shows exploring the theme of modern immigration. “Points of Entry: Reframing America” brings together 148 black-and-white photographs by seven artists who left Europe and immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, a generation or more after the great waves of turn-of-the-century immigration.

When these artists got here, most were surprised by what they found. Often employed as photojournalists, they pictured their experiences in ways that changed American self-perceptions forever.

The continuous thread that runs through the show is a current of social concern for disenfranchised Americans, who live in a nation founded on promises of universal liberty. Gender, class and especially race are repeatedly represented as markers sharply dividing people.

Alexander Alland (1902-1989) photographed squalid communal life in a New York City Gypsy enclave, as well as the varied offerings at an astonishingly multilingual newsstand, a Depression-era shantytown (a so-called Hooverville), the dark and dangerous industrial spaces beneath the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge and other such scenes of urban diversity and marginality.

A pedantic image of a pair of black hands holding an excerpt of the U.S. Constitution, which focuses on the 14th Amendment’s failed promise of equal protection under the law, shows how such socially minded photography can easily get mired in banality. But a poetic 1938 picture of a light shaft inside an ordinary Manhattan apartment building, soaring upward to a light-filled sky, is emblematic of Alland’s capacity for flushing out the unseen innards of a modern city’s public face.

Even more than Alland, Marion Palfi (1907-1978) saw herself as a social activist working with a camera. Black Americans in the segregated South were a frequent subject of her exceptional work--perhaps her most famous picture is a graceful 1949 portrait of the forlorn wife of a Georgia lynching victim--and one of her photographs appeared on the cover of the inaugural issue of Ebony magazine.

Otto Hagel (1909-1974) and Hansel Mieth (born 1909) knew each other as children and later married when they immigrated to Northern California. Arriving, respectively, just before and just after the stock market crash of 1929, they photographed the economic despair of the Great Depression, often with a steady eye for its political ramifications. Hagel’s picture of a 1938 meeting of the pro-Nazi German American Bund is marked by the incongruous juxtaposition of a swastika and a portrait of George Washington, which reverberates against Mieth’s slightly later image of Japanese American internees saluting the Stars and Stripes at a World War II relocation camp.

The three remaining photographers--John Gutmann (born 1905), Lisette Model (1901-1983) and Robert Frank (born 1924)--are the show’s most widely known artists. Gutmann’s photographs are characterized by a quietly Surrealist juxtaposition of ordinary but incongruous elements, which often typify the unprecedented cultural collisions of contemporary life, whereas Model is the brilliantly fearless portraitist of America’s anonymous mass of individuals. In a selection from Frank’s great photographic summa of the mid-1950s, “The Americans,” the exhibition concludes with a spectacular bang. His work represents the stunning transformation of the outsider artist into an Everyman. (Incidentally, a full accounting of Frank’s career will arrive in Los Angeles in March, when “Robert Frank: Moving Out” opens as the final exhibition at the Lannan Foundation.)

The sharp, precise attunement to pressing social issues represented by these photographers is almost certainly a function of their European birth and upbringing. Four came from Germany, and one each from Russia, Austria and Switzerland. Most were Jews. Almost all emigrated in the face of civil war and political uncertainty, or with the beast of fascism licking at their heels.

Palfi was 33 and Model 37 when they left Europe, but the rest were in their teens and 20s. Social repression was not an abstract issue for any of them; instead, it loomed large as cruelly lived experience--a formative one in the years during which they were coming to maturity. Today, when manicured academic social theory drives so much photographic practice, it’s easy to forget the often stunning power of such street-smart learning.

To some degree, the idealized image of the United States as a land of freedom and opportunity, coupled with its newly heroic internationalist stature in the devastating wake of World Wars I and II, may have made the inevitable disparities of America’s actual social life even more vivid to these newly arriving cameramen and camerawomen. The United States just didn’t look or feel like they expected it would--as no foreign land ever does to a traveler. Looking at the show, you often hold in your mind’s eye the unseen promotional image of an idealized United States, against which many of these gritty pictures seem to have been made.

Frank’s singular photographs are exceptionally riveting. He was the last of these seven immigrants to come, beginning his frequent excursions to New York in 1949 and setting out across the country deep in the self-satisfied 1950s. Within the frame of each photograph, both the idealized image and the stark reality of American life are on full view. They grate against one another, like tectonic plates.

‘Reframing America” comes with a useful catalog, which includes essays by poet Andrei Codrescu and Terence Pitts, director of Tucson’s Center for Creative Photography and organizer of the show. Its premise is so intriguing, however, and the work is of such consistently high caliber, that I wish the brief catalog essays went much further in exploring links among these artists’ experiences.

What role did the rise of European and American photojournalism play in their developing aesthetic? Did the Depression-era Federal Art Project have a discernible effect? What are the relationships between these immigrants’ pictures and those of native-born American photographers of the same period?

Those questions are left for another day. Still, the exhibition makes plain that they are well worth answering. These seven artists reframed America in ways that will continue to hold our attention for a long time to come.

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“Points of Entry: Reframing America,” Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego. Daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Through March 10. (619) 239-5262.