Unusual Views

There are at least two good reasons to make the short trek to the Getty Center from the Valley: the quietly dramatic sculpture in the courtyard by Martin Puryear and a fine photography show, “William Eggleston and the Color Tradition.”

The Getty has always displayed a passionate interest in photography, and the current exhibition celebrates a living master. Eggleston burst on the scene about 20 years ago with his luscious color imagery in a medium that generally pooh-poohed color.

The show spans many years and affirms what many have known for years: Eggleston, a Southerner who likes to shoot in his corner of the world, has an uncanny eye for everyday beauty and a way with color that shocks and delights.

His pictures are funny and visually arresting, and also deceptively mundane. He seeks the sublime hiding behind the supposedly trivial.

Sometimes, he finds it in the strangest, most out-of-the-way places, such as under a bed, in a freezer or in a green-tiled shower.

A tricycle, shot close up from ground level, becomes an unexpected icon. A battered old pinball machine, graced with chiaroscuro of light and shadow, is transformed into an object of meditative wonder. A building in ominous blue nocturnal light is awash in ambiguous splendor.

A gas station’s looming Gulf sign under a stormy sky turns into a beacon. In lesser hands, that image and others in the show could veer into standard roadside Americana. But Eggleston applies the stamp of his unique artistic instinct.

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When Eggleston includes human figures, the shots tend to be narrative mysteries rather than objective portraits. The ambiguity fuels intrigue.

One piece, invested with a strange, evocative power, is simply a view along the side of a nondescript building.

Sharply focused in the foreground, it quickly veers into fuzzier terrain, becoming a disarming study in the expressive moxie of depth of field and focus.

For the camera-ready Eggleston, the subject can be anywhere or anything. His work does much more than offer a quirky vision of the American South.

It embodies the idea of the calm sanctity of all things, a radical notion in an age of celebrity and media overkill.

Puryear’s sculpture, “That Profile,” speaks in a soft but insistent voice. Resembling a windblown jungle gym, the large but light-spirited piece serves as an introduction to the Getty grounds as visitors disembark from the tram that carries them to the museum.

An exhibition of models and drawings in the West Wing show the slow, steady evolution of Puryear’s vision and his obsession with the basic form of finished sculpture.

But it is difficult to get a sense of the work’s scale until you see it on site and embrace its gentle, airy charisma.

BE THERE

“William Eggleston and the Color Tradition,” through Jan. 30 at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Hours: Tuesday-Wednesday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursday-Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (310) 440-7300.