A Shot of Reality : Viewers can glimpse slices of others’ lives at museum devoted to the anonymous snapshot.

When word gets out that a new museum has opened, the public expects to locate it without much trouble. Museums are, generally, operated with fanfare and a sense of importance, qualities that assure potential patrons that something worth seeing, or knowing about, is treasured inside the grand edifice.

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To find Ventura County’s newest museum, however, some detective work is required. Proceed to downtown Santa Paula and head to the centrally located Nichols gallery.

Back in a corner, across the way from the “Browsorium,” is our newest cultural institution. It is the Santa Paula Snapshot Museum, “the only museum in the world,” according to the ironic hype, “devoted exclusively to the art of the anonymous snapshot.”

To the uninitiated, the very title could sound like a gag, or an oxymoron. Skeptics will ask: do the words “snapshot” and “museum” belong together?

Yes, if you ask John Nichols, the photographer and longtime gallery keeper, whose own tastes have over the years moved away from standard, polished definitions of what constitutes a good photograph.

Once the viewer conquers built-in biases about looking at candid amateur photography as art, snapshots can contain delights and startling, unexpected truths about human experience.

These images have been made for a variety of reasons, usually personal and sentimental, and almost never for the prospect of artistic glory.

That very lack of guile or artistic intention allows for a window on souls through which we’d never otherwise see.

In his own enlarged gallery--a newer, bigger, better space than his previous one--Nichols recently celebrated the fine art of funky gear, showing work, including his own, made by disposable and otherwise low-tech cameras.

But lately, Nichols’ interests as a collector have leaned more and more toward snapshots, especially from a pre-Kodachrome vintage.

Some of his holdings were featured in a recent show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, called “Snapshots, the Photography of Everyday Life, 1988 to the Present.”

The curatorship for this pint-sized museum--deciding which among hundreds of scattered images to display--is more critical than usual. Nichols plans to rotate the crop of images every few months from a supply that, needless to say, is virtually bottomless.

For the first exhibition, under the coy title, “Selections from the Permanent Collection,” 18 images are modestly displayed. They are arranged in no particular order, and, of course, with no information to get in the way of a pure, enigmatic relationship between the viewer and the viewed.

What can be seen, mostly in fragile, archival black and white prints, includes a pair of ostriches, jazz musicians in a tight corner, a bucket of snails, a woman teaching her cat to sit up and a shot of a two-horse Mexican town.

The content, though, is only one aspect of the allure. The very fact of the snapping, the simple process and lack of artistic intention, underscores the raw beauty.

One of the most striking images has words scrawled on the margins, therefore becoming a title, by the rules of the art world.

“The Tablecloth 1945” projects a surprisingly arty quality, as it seems to reflect on the quotidian beauty of a lace tablecloth illuminated by sunlight through the window.

Although the photograph itself has an intriguing visual character of its own, something is awry: The tablecloth doesn’t cover a table, but some other large piece of furniture.

The mystery of the photograph’s origin and intent--trivial though it may seem at first blush--deepens. Undoubtedly, part of the strange charm of this scattershot snapshot display is the inherent ambiguity attached.

We can try to appreciate these snapshots as uncommissioned, odd little slices of life, but it’s hard not to project on the where, when, who and especially the why of their creation. For the tiny legion of snapshot aficionados, a demographic that may grow thanks to this museum, the lack of answers keeps them coming back.

BE THERE

“Selections from the Permanent Collection,” at the Santa Paula Snapshot Museum, 935 E. Main St. in Santa Paula. Gallery hours: Wednesday-Sunday, noon-4 p.m.; (805) 525-7804.