Photography Exhibition Captures Getty’s Spirit

Panoramic views of L.A. are breathtaking seen from Richard Meier’s new Getty Center. They could well transform the world’s image of the city from a land of the bland to a place of magnificence. If that’s good for the civic psyche it poses a big challenge to the Getty Museum. In such a felicitous setting how can art be as interesting as reality?

Photography curator Weston Naef evidently decided to confront the problem directly in his inaugural exhibition. “Capturing Time: A Celebration of Photography” isn’t just a three-gallery encore of his department’s greatest hits. It’s a thoughtful selection of images that seem to ruminate on the question of what photography can do for reality.

As if cued by his surroundings, Naef included numerous panoramic landscapes. In both size and aptness, the most noticeable is a recent acquisition, a David Hockney masterpiece “Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18 April 1986.” It depicts an absurd intersection in the desert marked by a boulevard stop sign. Composed like a mosaic from literally hundreds of snapshot-size photos, it emulates the sensation of seeing heat waves rise in the outback. It poses the question of whether or not Hockney’s artistic illusion shows us a reality or a mirage. Because its structure alludes to Cubism, it asks where, for the individual, nature ends and art takes over. Each of us, it seems to say, lives in a cosmos of mental constructs that are, in effect, art fashioned from reality.

Naef’s show, as his title suggests, fastens on photography’s capacity to stop and warp time. He makes a keen point of this in the juxtaposition of two bucolic images taken in France on the River Huisine. The earliest is an 1858 composition in black and white by Camille Silvy. In 1990, American photographer Stephen Shore purposely re-shot Silvy’s version in color. Despite a good bit of topical change, the scene--after 132 years--remains in essence, serenely identical. These photographs capture the difference between humanity’s concept of time and nature’s unhurried indifference.

With all the above in mind any Angeleno is likely to be unnerved by their first glimpse of another wide landscape depicting a city in ruins. Is it Angeltown after the 1992 riots or two years later after the Northridge quake? Actually it’s Boston recorded by James Wallace Black after it burned in 1872. The camera compresses time into a reminder that disaster comes to terrify while life goes surprisingly on. There’s a certain reassurance in the persistence of things.

And a certain dismay. A recent suite of four pictures by contemporary Carrie Mae Weems is called “The Past Revisited.” It’s directly based on daguerreotypes from the Getty collection depicting African Americans around the time slavery was abolished in 1862. Weems’ first section shows a beautiful black female reclining nude. The photographer affixed the caption “You Became Playmate to the Patriarch.” The final print of a stalwart black man suggests a history of success against great odds. Thank goodness for hope.

In short, the exhibition shows the camera quite capable of creating a panorama of its own. It may be less awesome than the one outside, but it has the compensatory capacity of zooming through time and space to fix on telling details. There are sobering reports like Harold Edgerton’s images of bullets striking steel in real time or Timothy O’Shea’s documentation of Civil War soldier’s corpses in a field, dead in no time.

After that a certain necessity for fantasy asserts itself. There’s Roger Fenton’s 19th century Englishman’s staged reverie of being a pasha with his own harem. Henry Peach Robinson’s contribution hopes for a comfy old age. Gary Winogrand’s wonderfully wry ‘60s shot of LAX sees Los Angeles hoping for a science-fiction future.

The exhibition invites long thoughts and large ideas. Given that art and its surroundings invariably interact, it’s not surprising that the show seems to echo its larger environment. In a way they’re inseparable.

Everything about visiting the Getty Center seems to induce a certain frame of mind. The steep tram ride up the hill offers distance from the hectic and arrival at a place, a place that’s about something else. Meier’s architecture suggests both a rugged pre-archaic Arcadian past and a slightly unattainable future. Both are pristine ideals. Robert Irwin’s garden asks for the time required to discover the connection between its serenity and its dynamism.

A first visit to the Getty Center causes a slow meltdown of the proposition that this is a haughty elitist citadel. It’s a place that offers everyone the serious pleasure of contemplating life’s larger panorama.

* The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive; through March 22. Parking reservations (310) 440-7300. Closed Mondays.