LAPD Unsealed: Revealing a City’s Stressful Moments

At Fototeka Gallery, “To Protect and Serve: The LAPD Archives, 100 Years of Photography” presents about 80 photographs culled from the Los Angeles Police Historical Society Archives and the City Records Center. Organized by Tim Wride, associate curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and gallery directors Robin Blackman and Merrick Morton, the exhibition is remarkable simply for having opened.

Most of the photographs, which were taken by police officers as part of their investigations, have never been exhibited publicly. Sealed in boxes packed away in a downtown storeroom for confidential government documents, many have not been seen since they appeared as evidence in courtrooms. A few of the vintage prints are fading with age. Some of the oldest negatives, made of flammable cellulose nitrate, will be destroyed unless temperature-controlled storage can be found.

As an exhibition, “To Protect and Serve” is a sampler, a mix-and-match survey in which grim crime-scene photographs are juxtaposed with cheery publicity stills that advertise the department’s ideals. Both are interspersed with dispassionate close-ups by the oldest crime lab in the country, L.A.’s Scientific Investigations Division.

Hollywood’s proximity is registered by the presence of celebrities, including Jack Webb on the set of “Dragnet” and Kent McCord learning how to handle a gun for his role in “Adam 12.” Marilyn Monroe’s signature appears in an officer’s logbook, and silent movie star Thelma Todd slumps dead in the front seat of her car. How she died is still a mystery.

Fame intermingles with infamy, most pointedly where a picture of John F. Kennedy occupies the same wall as a pair of color mug shots of Charles Manson. But the majority of the people portrayed are anonymous--and all the more haunting for being just like anyone else. Four views of the room in which Lenny Bruce overdosed drive home the point that tragedy and banality often go hand in hand.

The romance of movies can be seen in the most visually compelling photographs. For example, a haze-shrouded image of three officers investigating a corpse in the L.A. riverbed is so beautifully composed and evocatively lighted that it resembles a shot from a masterfully designed set. Likewise, a picture of two victims of a mob hit, still seated in a restaurant’s booth before their unfinished plates of pasta, recalls a scene from “The Godfather.” It’s hard to say whether the amateur photographers who took these pictures were influenced by the classics of film noir, or if the directors who worked in that genre paid attention to real police work.

Although suffering and sadness fill many images, particularly those that depict bruised and bandaged assault victims, comedy plays an important role. In one of the more humorous prints, an officer rides a motorcycle outfitted with a sidecar jail. Shaped like a phone booth, it contains a frowning suspect.

In another, two astonished detectives peer from a tunnel dug by bootleggers. And a pair of pictures juxtaposes seven male veterans lined up for doughnuts with a row of 10 female rookies, whose beehive hairdos and chorus-line formation contrast dramatically with the powerful handguns they hold.

Except for 10 undated photographs and one from the 1970s, all of the images in “To Protect and Serve” date from the 1920s to the 1960s. Why the curators didn’t change the title’s reference to “100 years” to acknowledge this fact is a mystery. Nevertheless, the exhibition leaves visitors wanting to see more. A much larger show would allow their fascinating sampling to provide an important historical overview, in which cogent themes and pressing issues were developed.

Fototeka Gallery, 1549 Echo Park Ave., Echo Park, (213) 250-4686, through Sept. 30. Open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

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Slackers and Circles: The best works in “Out of Bounds: Working Off Paper” are mildly amusing. The worst are too slight to merit much more than a smirk. As a result, the 10-artist show, organized by independent curator Julie Dreamer for the Luckman Gallery at Cal State L.A., fails to add up to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Sonja Feldmeier’s seven large portraits are the most complicated works displayed. Acting as if she were a police sketch artist, the Basel, Switzerland, artist invited people she met to describe someone they idolized. She then used digital picture archives and FBI imaging software to translate their verbal descriptions into visual forms, making adjustments until each collaborator was satisfied with the portrait’s accuracy.

The resulting images of such celebrities as Johnny Depp, Claudia Schiffer and Molly Ringwald resemble poor second cousins or unconvincing impersonators of the real stars. Although Feldmeier’s project is meant to lay bare the idiosyncratic nature of common fantasies, what it actually reveals is how hard it is to find a good sketch artist, and the intrinsic shortcomings of the process.

The remaining works are more simplistic. L.A. artist Mungo Thomson crafted a dozen handmade pencils and stuck them in the ceiling of the foyer, as bored students sometimes do. Recalling the oversize yellow pencil Vija Celmins made in the 1960s, Thomson’s version embodies diminished ambitions.

Holding a felt-tip pen in the center of a sheet of paper, Karachi-born, London-based artist Ceal Floyer videotaped the circle that grew as the paper absorbed more and more ink. The one-hour-43 minute video ends when the pen runs dry.

Hastily sketched images by Andrei Roiter, David Shrigley and Olav Westphalen trod the well-worn path of slacker humor. Rather than expanding the practice of drawing, as the exhibition intends, their tiresome works stick to the style of the moment: Slapdash cartoons and smart-aleck texts provide little more than forgettable diversions.

Although stylistic diversity and conceptual variety are supposedly featured in “Out of Bounds,” it appears that more curatorial attention was paid to the artists’ birthplaces than their works. Roiter, Shrigley and Westphalen were born in Russia, Scotland and Germany, respectively. Others hail from Toronto, Vienna and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Like the L.A. International Biennial, Dreamer’s exhibition exaggerates the importance of artists’ nationalities. This misguided maneuver is disingenuous, especially when the art is so blandly international that where it was made has little to do with how it looks.

Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, (323) 343-6610, through Oct. 13. Closed Fridays and Sundays.

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Inhospitable World: Despite being conceptually uneven and stylistically all over the place, Barnaby Sweet’s first solo show in Los Angeles is promising. At the Pink Gallery, 20 color photographs by the 25-year-old artist fall into three groups.

The smallest and least interesting one is made up of portraits--generic depictions of men and boys too jaded (or insecure) to let viewers get beyond their bored poses. Rather than hinting at individual responses to the experiences life has thrown at them, the blank faces of Sweet’s sitters make them look emotionally vacant.

As a photographer, Sweet does a lot better with inanimate objects. His next group of pictures features empty yards, rooms and skies. Composed so that most of the visual incidents hug each image’s perimeter, these oddly expansive works appear to be bigger than their actual dimensions. Likewise, several sharply focused close-ups relish the textures of window screens, mosquito netting and the surfaces of swimming pools, mundane objects whose scale is indeterminate.

Sweet’s best photographs infuse ordinary interiors with such an eerie glow that they seem to be the props for dramas set on another planet. In the blue-tinted “Laundromat,” a row of front-loading washing machines has the presence of an alien spacecraft’s command center. In “Red Tate,” Sweet transforms a high-tech auditorium into a futuristic living room, where the border between voyeurism and relaxation is difficult to pinpoint.

Other works, which depict an apartment’s intercom, a concrete parking structure and the passenger compartment of a high-speed train, are endowed with such suffocating stillness that they seem to have been designed without people in mind. With his eye for the inhuman aspects of man-made spaces, Sweet appears to have the talent to chronicle the inhospitable world modern society has made for itself.

The Pink Gallery, 1555 Echo Park Ave., Echo Park, (213) 977-8839, through Sept. 30. Open Friday through Sunday.

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Another World: In a small show at Deep River Gallery, Ceres Madoo celebrates the irrepressibility of the human imagination. Combining discarded furniture cushions, a rug, a pillow, a stretched canvas and several handmade toys, the L.A. artist demonstrates that creativity is not a matter of inventing things out of thin air but of adapting what is at hand.

In Madoo’s hands, a painted Persian rug becomes an airplane-window view of fertile fields. At one end of the work, which lies flat on the floor, a throw pillow stands in for a hill; the pillow-hill is covered with a grove of homemade, model train-scale trees. Towering above the mini-installation, you feel Brobdingnagian.

Another piece juxtaposes three larger-than-life-size moths made of wood and a wall-mounted cushion on which Madoo has painted a window in a cartoon castle’s wall. The most mysterious sculpture consists of a sofa cushion that she has painted to resemble an immense swimming pool or a man-made pond. Atop the zigzagged pattern of its bright blue surface rests a toy rowboat, complete with oars, rope and life-ring.

Usually, when works of art are made of found objects, they convey all sorts of forlorn associations. In contrast, Madoo’s makeshift landscape couldn’t be more playful. “Dive into my fanciful world,” it seems to say. “You’ve got nothing to lose but your dispiriting seriousness and tedious solemnity.”

Deep River Gallery, 712 Traction Ave., downtown L.A., (213) 625-2958, through Sept. 30. Open Saturdays and Sundays.