A Gritty, Witty and Sensitive Look at the Homeless Among Us

To be homeless is not only to lack a home, but also to be defined by that lack in essentially negative terms.

Opening up that constricting definition is just one of the many achievements of “The Way Home,” a thoughtful, absorbing exhibition of documentary photography at the Central Library’s Getty Gallery. Another is to represent the diversity in age, race and circumstance of those who wind up homeless, and yet another is to invite and applaud activism on their behalf.

Since created by its earliest practitioners, social documentary photography has been instrumental in exposing the gritty realities of child labor, poverty, inadequate housing and other pressing issues. The 13 photographers engaged to produce work for this show, subtitled “Ending Homelessness in America,” stretch the genre to integrate images of ongoing, viable solutions as well, such as shelters, job training programs and rehabilitation centers. A more complex, multifaceted picture of homelessness results.

Just as important, this approach provides viewers with specific, productive outlets for the empathy and fury that the images elicit. “The Way Home” was organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, in conjunction with the National Alliance to End Homelessness and Harry N. Abrams Inc., which published the show’s handsome and informative catalog. Philip Brookman of the Corcoran and Jane Slate Siena of the Getty Conservation Institute served as curators.

It’s a savvy show and a sensitive one. Savvy, in its inclusion of high-profile names like Tipper Gore, whose own photojournalistic career has been put on the back burner during her many years spent in the political spotlight, and Annie Leibovitz, best known for high-gloss celebrity portraits. Neither has much to add to the show, but neither are they capable of dragging down such a grand enterprise, so solid are the other choices--photojournalistic luminaries like Mary Ellen Mark, Stephen Shames, Benedict Fernandez and Donna Ferrato.

Some, like Ferrato and L.A. Times photographer Clarence Williams, make extended portraits of a few individuals, articulating their daily routines: the single mother’s early morning bus to the job training class, the disabled man’s sponge bath beneath the freeway overpass. Others, like Jodi Cobb, capture telling details, like the leathery hands of an old shelter resident cradling those of a young newcomer. Affirmative images like this go far to expand the outsider’s notion of what fills the lives of the homeless--pain and despair, we know already from looking on the streets around us, but the laughter, camaraderie, determination and tenderness are not always as evident to us.

The dozen photographs by Mary Ellen Mark are among the most searing, enduring images in the show. They frame incongruities--delicacy amid squalor; beauty within filth; play alongside need--that reinforce with absolute poetry the fundamental inconsistency of homelessness itself in our prosperous nation. Facts and figures about homelessness are available in the gallery, but these pictures tell the story far more effectively than numbers can. Faces--tired, aggrieved, energetic, sapped, satisfied--personalize the catastrophe. They are the indisputable facts of the matter.

* Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library, 630 W. 5th St., (213) 228-7000, through Oct. 15. Open daily.

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The Animals and Us: Just where do animals belong, in relation to humans? Are they beneath us, inferior, less cognizant or evolved? Are they superior to us, their social structures more viable, more in step with the Earth’s rhythms? Or are they our equals, our kin, fellow creatures sharing the planet, our fates fundamentally linked?

Such questions trickle through the exhibition “Bestiary,” at the Armory Center for the Arts, but never gather the momentum of a coursing, compelling force. Works by the 22 artists in the show explore the status of animals in myriad ways and multiple forms, through photographs, paintings, videos, sculpture and installation. A few artists--Jo Ann Callis in her dog portraits and John Geary in his tender, primate drawings--examine the particular personalities of animals.

Most, though, use animals as vehicles for exploring our own social habits. The subject may appear to be the animal “other,” but in typical egocentric human fashion, the subject is really always us and what our definitions of the other say about ourselves.

Curators Claudine Ise of the UCLA Hammer Museum and Mary-Kay Lombino of the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach refer, more often than seems justified by the art on view, to issues of gender and sexual identity probed through the representation of animals in anthropomorphic guises.

In the video “Negative Bunny” (1994), for instance, Nayland Blake wiggles a stuffed animal in front of the camera and has it plead (for 30 nearly unendurable minutes) to have sex with whomever it’s addressing, insisting that it’s “really, really” HIV-negative. Sitting through the video is almost as exasperating as reading in the show’s slim catalog that a color photograph of a horizontal blur by Susan Silton was, likewise, motivated by those same ever-current issues of gender and sexual identity. Such descriptions read like contrived ballast, attached to vessels too conceptually slight on their own.

The quirky evolutionary studies of Alexis Rockman, Marvin Israel’s edgy scenes of dogs in spare, interrogation-like spaces and Tom Knechtel’s odd and meticulous drawings of goats, crows and an infant griffin provide the show’s real weight, even with their relatively quiet visual presence. Others, including Michelle Rollman, James Elaine, Brandon LaBelle, M.A. Peers, Tim Ebner, D.L. Alvarez and Ulrike Palmbach, make more elaborate gestures. But, in general, the show feels overly domesticated, a bit low on real animal energy.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (626) 792-5101, through Aug. 27. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

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A Mixed Bag: “A Collaboration,” at Patricia Correia Gallery, is a show with a neat and tidy concept: Twenty-eight artists were invited to choose a partner and create a collaborative work, to be displayed alongside other works made by the artists individually. Quite an appealing notion, ripe with possibilities for synergy, but not much in the way of cohesion happens here. Mostly the results are muddled, like overly ambitious fusion food that drowns the innate flavors of its ingredients.

The quality of those ingredients at the outset counts for a good deal, though, and judging by the independently made works on view here, the artists invited to participate were not, overall, an impressive bunch. Teamwork only raised the stakes; it didn’t necessarily improve the tools.

Many of the artists work with an accretive sensibility to begin with, and with a few notable exceptions their assemblages and mixed-media pieces reflect a more-is-better approach. “All This to End Up Dead” by Jack Howe, Craig La Rotonda and Kim Marie (one of several three-person creations in the show) enshrines an array of clues to a life--photographs, rosary beads, medicine bottles, a Tarot card, key, tooth and passport stamp--in a worn leather box. The veneer of time lays heavily over all, giving the assemblage the feel of a rusted memory.

Susan Tibbles also contributes an evocative assemblage, combining an old hand-colored photograph of a smiling woman, a scrub brush and a violin bow. Woman, tool and instrument conflate provocatively.

Such concision and eloquence are rare, however. A collage by Lynn Bennett marries Dada and Pop to refreshing, spunky effect, and a trio of small intriguing gouache-paintings by Ann Chamberlin and Jo Didner present bizarre tableaux that call to mind the rich incongruities that emerged when the Surrealists played their parlor game of Exquisite Corpse, in which several artists each contributed a section to a drawing without being able to see the parts done by the others. Exquisite Corpse, as a creative framework for collaboration was, in fact, reprised several years ago for a show organized by the Drawing Center in New York. That show shined; this one doesn’t.

* Patricia Correia Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-1760, through Aug. 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.