A Bigger Lens on the World

Amid the blaring of fire alarms being tested, Arthur Ollman walked calmly through the museum he helped found 17 years ago. Flinching at the sound as he stepped over rolled carpeting and around freshly painted walls, Ollman laughed at the disarray that at that moment characterized the Museum of Photographic Arts.

A dream that began in 1989 will be realized on Saturday, when the museum reopens with a major exhibition of its 5,000-piece permanent collection after a year’s closure for renovation and expansion. Once a tiny and mostly hidden presence in the bucolic cultural oasis of Balboa Park just northeast of downtown, this is a coming of age for the museum, which specializes in all forms of photography--both art and documentary.

The museum opened its doors for the first time in 1983 with 7,500 square feet of space, about 6,000 of it devoted to galleries. The current $6-million renovation will more than quadruple the museum’s size, to just over 31,000 square feet, with substantial additions to galleries for the permanent collection, special exhibitions and storage, as well as a new scholarly library and a plush 230-seat theater for a new film program.

Ollman, the museum’s first and only director, had long felt the need to make the museum’s presence more visible. Photography’s popularity and the museum’s active exhibition program ensured audiences who specifically sought out the museum, but finding it wasn’t always easy, and casual drop-ins were rare. Buried inside a historic pavilion between the city’s sports museum and historical society, the Museum of Photographic Arts previously had no presence on the park’s well-trafficked pedestrian boulevard. Eleven years ago, the city of San Diego, which owns the facility, promised the museum adjacent space then allocated to the Hall of Champions, but it had to wait until that sports museum moved into larger quarters. The reshuffling of spaces finally took place last year. But the wait was worth it: The new space is not only big, it’s also well-positioned. Its entrance is now readily apparent to the uninitiated.

The new galleries, designed by La Jolla architect David Raphael Singer--who also designed the museum’s original space--are as straightforward, flexible and low-key as ever, with varying ceiling heights to accommodate the changing scale of photographs in the contemporary art world. An enlarged bookstore and classroom also are included among the public areas. The museum’s annual budget has expanded from less than $1 million to $1.6 million, and a capital campaign is underway to create a $1.1-million endowment.

Specialized museums are becoming more common, but ones devoted just to photography are still rare. Only a handful exist around the country, and while Los Angeles has major photography collections at the Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, no one of those collections is as all-inclusive of the photographic medium as the Museum of Photographic Arts.

“When we opened, we were filling a need in the community for photography. Photography was being exhibited everywhere in the world, but not here in San Diego,” Ollman said. “There was a group of people who were interested in photography, and they started something which met those needs, a museum without walls. They had a desire to get exhibitions to San Diego, wherever they could rent a gallery.”

Before the museum’s opening in 1983, Ollman was hired from San Francisco, where he worked as a photographer and as chairman of the board of San Francisco Cameraworks, a nonprofit exhibition space. The creation of the San Diego museum followed close on the heels of a substantial expansion in the commercial market for art photographs, as well as greater academic interest in the field. Often seen as a stepchild to more traditional art forms like painting and sculpture, photography had begun to attract a broad base of specialized enthusiasts, many of them photographers themselves.

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The museum’s specialization has not been a limitation, Ollman insists. “Photography has so many things about it that don’t fit the paradigm of the art world,” he says. “For example, as a curator and as a historian, one of the things we do all the time is search non-art manifestations of the medium and scoop them into the pantheon.” These have included scientific photographs as well as journalists’ work. But photographers who set out to be artists also are a part of the program, drawing from the local community and the international art world.

Like many small museums with big ambitions, the Museum of Photographic Arts’ presence sometimes has seemed larger outside San Diego than within. Its retrospective of Arnold Newman’s work traveled to museums in 14 cities in the U.S. and internationally between 1986 and ’93. A three-part exhibition about immigration, “Points of Entry,” was highly praised by critics and seemed particularly apt for a city whose border with Mexico ensures commercial prosperity as well as a constant challenge to immigration regulators.

Ollman, who has organized most of these shows along with a small curatorial staff, has a clear bias in how he looks at work. “I want to see art that has some utility, some way of interacting with the world. I want it to in some way have some usefulness on the planet, either now, or in the past or future. Which is to say it can tell somebody something. I want something that takes me someplace I’ve never been. And I don’t mean to the Lower Zambezi River. I want to get some experience, some knowledge, some awareness I’ve never had before.

“In its largest definition, I believe that photography has so much more impact in the world than the art scene alone,” Ollman says. “Yes, we don’t have some of the wealth and perks that come with being the high-end art scene, if that’s what interests you. We have some very high prices now, of course--$1 million will buy just two really good pictures--but at the same time, photography’s interest for me is that photography gets up every morning and goes to work. It gets some things done. To me, that interaction with the world has always been one of the most powerful underpinnings.”

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Ollman, 51, whose wife, Leah, is a frequent art writer for The Times, has taken a significant new turn in adding film to the museum schedule. He just hired the museum’s first film curator, Scott Marks, who previously taught at Columbia College in Chicago and organized film programs there.

The museum does not plan to collect films, but its three-day-per-week screenings will include new and classic features and documentaries. The first series focuses on movies that reflect on the art of cinema, while the second includes movies about rock ‘n’ roll. Marks said he will also regularly schedule lectures about film and hopes to show some premieres.

Also new to the facilities is the Edmund L. and Nancy K. Dubois Library upstairs from the galleries, which has as its foundation a collection of books and periodicals assembled by the Beverly Hills-based Duboises. Nancy Dubois, who also serves as a volunteer in LACMA’s photography department, over the next four years will give the photographic arts museum nearly all of the books and periodicals she has acquired since she began collecting with her late husband in 1973. Mark Hammond, the museum’s librarian, estimates the donation will number between 10,000 and 20,000 volumes.

“I’ve been a member of the museum ever since it opened,” Dubois said. “I’ve always been impressed with the shows that they put on, and became friends with Arthur Ollman. When the museum was expanding, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to keep the collection intact. LACMA didn’t have space for the entire collection.”

Dubois’ gift has inspired others to follow, and Ollman is hopeful the same growth trend will be true for the rest of the museum. The museum’s exhibition program is scheduled through early 2002--next up after the permanent collection highlights is L.A.-based artist Susan Rankaitis, scheduled to open June 4, then Robert Frank’s famous “The Americans” in August. And Ollman is actively soliciting donations.

“If you’re bigger,” he says hopefully, “people will give you bigger gifts.”

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“EXPANDED VISION: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION,” Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado in Balboa Park, San Diego. Dates: Saturday through May 29. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Prices: Adults, $2; students, seniors, military, $1; children under 12, free. Phone: (619) 238-7559.