Picture Perfect

Photography has made admirable strides into the world of fine art in recent decades, a movement even noticed in our region--if in sparing, fleeting doses. The brave, now defunct Atget Gallery presented a number of impressive photography shows before closing, and the Janss/Nichols Gallery has also exclusively represented the medium, including many of its past and living masters.

For a solid view of the sometimes far-flung expressive possibilities of the medium, proceed to the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, where the current group show, “Beyond Boundaries,” deals with the impressive variety of photographic work by California-based photographers.

For further viewing, the Thousand Oaks Community Gallery is showing a generous helping of works by members of the local group known as Camera Illuminata (“the lighted room”). Founded in 1998 as the Conejo Valley Fine Art Photography Assn., the group took on the more poetic handle last year and has shown in various venues around the area. This marks its debut in an official art space.

By its very nature, this is a hodgepodge of a show, without any particular curatorial agenda, but there’s much to see and much to admire.

Some of the artists here, including Stephen Schaf, have been seen in other group and solo shows around the county. Here, his series of infrared images, with film sprocket holes on the top and bottom to suggest a vague cinematic persona, include a surprising outhouse in Elgin, S.C.

Larry Janss, gallery owner and fine photographer in his own right, shows several pieces, some of which will be familiar to local art watchers. Among the eye-catchers are “Jenny/Sally,” an enigmatic portrait of a woman with a gaze half come-hither and half go-thither. Janss’ “The Straw Dream,” a landscape in which the reflection of snowy mountains in a river doesn’t correspond with the scene we’re seeing, turns surreal, via darkroom manipulation.

The computer-aided “darkroom” also affects Joseph Montageu’s bird’s-eye views of the New Orleans cityscape. With his close-ups of sometimes unidentifiable patterns found in nature, Ray Lemieux goes for a more abstract end result, from natural sources.

Some of the most striking work in this show coheres into a focused series, in which the artist finds an area, a technique or specific set of imagery to explore and vary. For Nancy Joseph, the subject is Provence and the odd warmth of light and color as revealed through conspicuously cropped views of architecture. An image as simple, yet affecting, as “Green Shutters” becomes a study in spectral harmony. For Michael Appuliese, landscape is about the general, idyllic sprawl of fields rather than the specificity of obvious points of interest.

Frank Kolwicz captures Native American ritual sites in black and white, with particular grace in the image “Kiva Detail, Aztec National Monument.” A very different topography concerns the images of Susan Kundell, whose floral studies include close-ups of cactuses, which turn out to be on the property of the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Art rears its head when you least expect it.

Flowers, very up close and personal, become a disarming and fresh source of inspiration for Alice Cahill. She does nothing more dramatic or revolutionary than move in tight on exotic blossoms, but she brings to the business a heightened appreciation of form and color. There’s the beauty of photography, finding and revealing the magic in things under our noses.

DETAILS

“Camera Illuminata,” through Dec. 17 at the Thousand Oaks Community Gallery, 2331-A Borchard Road in Thousand Oaks. Gallery hours: 1-5 p.m., Thurs.-Sun.; 498-4390.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com