Fuzzy Logic

John Nichols, the noted and devoted photographer-curator-gallery owner, has been collecting and presenting art--usually photography--since 1984 in various addresses in downtown Santa Paula. He has offered a movable oasis of art in a quaint town normally somewhat shy of flaunting its culture.

But his latest address is the best yet, with copious floor space for a gallery, books on the second-floor balcony, and a niche for rare books and prints called the “Browsarium.” Most important, for our interests, the art is very much upfront and in the open, a statement of priorities.

Fittingly, Nichols is inaugurating the new, improved space with a fascinating group show based on a concept dear to his heart--as both photographer and curator-collector. With the exhibition “Primitive Modernists,” he brings together works of artists from around the country, “photographers exploring their vision through low-tech equipment.”

Nichols has long held an interest, bordering on cultist obsession, with photography created by the funkiest of means, often with the now-collectible $2.95 plastic camera called the Diana. Using this camera, and others like it, the end result is grainy, with fuzzy perimeters and unpredictable lighting, often making for enlightened accidents and imagery that, if less than pristine, conveys a distinctive otherworldliness.

There’s a mild-mannered revolution afoot here. In a sense, these photographers are reacting to the school of photography that demands absolute control over process and product, where focus is king. Here, Nichols writes in a statement: “Diana is Goddess. Together, we hunt.”

Sometimes, the odd images produced by this group of cheapskate shuttersmiths yield new insights into old terrain. A shot of vintage architecture from Michael Pierazzi’s “Paris at the Turn” series is seen from a tilted angle, shaky of focus and snapped with from-the-hip compositional sense. The result is an emphasis on the ephemeral actual experience of the scene, rather than reinforcing perceived truths about antiquity or old world stateliness.

Anne Arden McDonald shows dark, delicate square-format pictures, of simple things writ mysterious: a ladder in a garden, a carousel in the dusky background suggest found poetry in the everyday. The same is true of Kelly McKaig’s pinhole camera view of an otherwise prosaic industrial scene in “Ohio River Co. 1991.”

Here, the purposeful roughness of the image quality hints at a mock archival effect, as in Jonathan Bailey’s “Courtyard.” We’re reminded, wistfully, of the humble standards of early photography, before fast film and crispness became increasingly important to the medium.

Generally, these images seem to come from another time, and another place. Nichols, for instance, seems to be capturing scenes from another world--or, more to the point, depicting our world filtered through a very strange lens.

A simple image like the one in “Bike, Monterey Jazz Festival,” becomes a study in overlapping forms and lines, its surface textures taking on a painterly density.

Via Nichols’ selective eye and his mercurial technology, other common objects turn alien before our eyes. A shot of the Oscar Mayer “Wienermobile” appears like a bulbous space-age vehicle, while a humble trailer in a desolate orchard promising “Apricots” could be read as a repository of fading or lost agrarian values (especially in a part of the county where agriculture has still, so far, largely resisted SoCal development).

There is something about the Diana camera, and its progeny of cheapo cameras, that makes some photographers introspective about details in the melee of the modern world. So R. Clarke-Davis captures grainy views of a corner of tablecloth soaking up sunlight or a black-gloved hand clutching a bright white plastic foam cup.

On the other hand, for New Jersey-based Judith Friedman, the visual draw comes from frenetic urban scenes. She savors the maze-like clutter, enhanced by reflections in storefront windows, in SoHo or at a peep show in Boston.

British-born Indian Annu Matthews’ series “Exploring My Diaspora” retraces her Indian roots with simple imagery, enhanced by moody lighting and backlighting, effects courtesy of her funky gear. Janet Schipper’s diptychs explore the dualities of reality and artifice, as in “Mirage Lion,” in which a plaster “big cat” sits, permanently stilled and defanged, in a manicured garden.

Unlike the others in the show, Jim Vecchi uses a more modern variation on the lowly amateur camera, the Kodak Fun Saver Panoramic Camera, designed to be round-filed after the film is used up. These long-format prints exploit the horizontality of an image, as with “This Wound of Beauty,” a poetic title for a shot of a canoe on a lake. Here, the pale color and lazy grace could remind us of respected photographer Joel Meyerowitz’s work, minus the painstaking darkroom finish.

Some fine-art photography wears its craftsmanship proudly--the polished fruits of labor undertaken as much in the laboratory as in the field.

The art at the Nichols gallery gives us more a sense of work coming through faith, improvisational panache and good luck, and a pile of film at the ready.

Ultimately, the aesthetic criterion is the same: When an image sings in a moving way, it doesn’t matter greatly what key it’s in. It’s the end effect that counts.

BE THERE

“Primitive Modernists,” through September at the John Nichols Gallery, 935 Main St., Santa Paula. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday; (805) 525-7804.