Photos That Develop With Layers of Time

The term “alternative” has less relevance than ever in contemporary art discourse. Alternative to what? In this anything-goes cultural moment--call it pluralistic, democratic, indiscriminate--there is no single mainstream from which to deviate.

Technically speaking, it’s hard even to think of a substance that has not yet been rendered an artistic medium, from chocolate to soap, vacuum cleaners to elephant dung, fingernails to dryer lint. Given this leveled state of affairs, the title of White Room’s current show, “Contemporary Alternative Photography,” might seem gratuitous, but it’s not. Not only does the show contain some extraordinary work, but it identifies a phenomenon within photographic practice that has everything to do with purposeful distance from the norm.

Nearly all of the 13 artists included belong to what Lyle Rexer, author of several books on art and photography, has dubbed “Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde.” They use old photographic processes, or variants thereof, to make images that straddle the 19th and 21st centuries. Photography’s already complex engagement with time thickens and intensifies in work so insistently of the past and the present.

Deborah Luster’s stunning portraits illustrate just how the layers of significance build. Luster prints her small-scale images (5 by 4 inches) in silver gelatin on aluminum, a format reminiscent of the tintype. Invented in 1856, tintypes were small, unique prints on prepared metal plates. Cheap and readily available, they became extremely popular during the Civil War, as soldiers could have them made in the field and sent home to loved ones.

Luster’s pictures have an elegance their predecessors generally lacked, but a similar stark, haunting presence. Her subjects, men and women, black and white, are prisoners in three Louisiana correctional facilities. They present themselves with sobriety (even when in Halloween or Mardi Gras costumes) and the dignity of the self-possessed. Though formally posed, the portraits feel intimate. Like tintypes, they beg to be held, as their subjects, lost to distance and circumstance, cannot be.

Another compelling body of work here, by Raymond Meeks, represents athletes competing in the 2002 Winter Olympics. His ambrotype portraits (made by backing a glass negative with an opaque material) are wonderfully shadowy and oblique. Long on character and short on information, they reverse the conventional formula used in making these faces known to the public.

Similarly, the two action shots here (printed on paper from wet collodion negatives, a dominant process from the 1850s to the 1880s) are deliciously anachronistic. The process harks from an era of bulky cameras and long exposures; the subjects--luge and cross-country skiing--are sports whose performances are measured in milliseconds and documented accordingly.

By shifting to an obsolete process, Meeks enacts a change in our frame of reference, re-invoking a sense of awe and wonder at the speed of human locomotion. The luge image, with its bullet-like rider and slightly tilted spectators, brings to mind Jacques Lartigue’s charming early 20th century photographs of racing cars.

White Room’s show is dense with marvels like these--lovely photogravures of scenes in Japan by Peter Miller; palladium prints by James Pitts that recall the distilled beauty of Karl Blossfeldt’s studies of plant forms; Tsutomu Otsuko’s intriguing silver prints toned by the action of earth and water; precious botanical images in ambrotype by France Scully Osterman, and more.

Solarized photomontages from the 1940s through the 1970s by the late Edmund Teske are interesting though quirky inclusions in an otherwise contemporary gathering. Olivia Parker’s digital Nash prints pull the show in yet another direction, toward the future, but the soul of this show is in the past, nearer to photography’s origins as a hybrid of science, art and magic.

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White Room Gallery, 8810 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 859-2402, through July 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.

A Different Kind of Family Album

Guiding Chris Verene’s photographs of family, friends and neighbors in his hometown of Galesburg, Ill., are equal parts affection and affectation.

Verene has been recording the lives of his extended circle for 15 years, and the tenderness implicit in that commitment sneaks into some of the pictures themselves--especially those showing people caring for others, worrying about them or mourning them. But in the selection now at Rose Gallery, one can see strategy at work, a stylistic strategy that gives Verene’s humanism a bit of an edge.

Verene shoots in color and writes identifying captions on the pictures’ wide white borders. The scenes (portraits and interiors, mainly) are harshly lighted, like old flashbulb pictures. In book form as well as on the wall, the series reads like a family album, a chronicle made by an insider, primarily for domestic use.

It’s contrived to look amateurish, which gives it a kind of backhanded charm. Verene identifies characters--tough, preteen Billy; the cooler, older Josh; beleaguered cousin Steve and his sad-faced little girl; Grandpa Bill, the lonely widower--and fleshes out their stories through sequences that show us their homes as well as their problems. Billy lives in a room where the walls are scarred with graffiti more befitting a bus bench than a young boy’s bedroom. Steve’s wife left the family to live in a women’s shelter. Relatives are stealing from old Grandpa Bill.

Celebratory pictures of new babies being tossed and the family gathered around the breakfast table on Christmas morning leaven the mood, but only slightly. No ordinary family album would focus on so much compromise. Verene (who now lives in Brooklyn) may love his hometown and its citizens, but it’s a love vexed by distance and a superior education.

It’s not insignificant that Verene credits acerbic social commentator Larry Fink for giving him confidence. He must have needed a good deal of emotional stamina to construct such a grim, barbed homage to the place he called home.

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Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through July 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

The Multiple Resonance of Collage

If collage tends to function as a tribute to the preexisting, how fitting that one collage artist would use another as raw matter with which to build his own work. Ray Johnson did just that with Joseph Cornell--not with Cornell’s work as much as with his persona. Johnson, Cornell and Hannelore Baron represent “Three Approaches to Collage” in a handsome, nicely crafted show by that name at Manny Silverman Gallery.

Johnson (1927-1995) and Baron (1926-1987) were contemporaries, a generation younger than Cornell (1903-1972). Drawing from the realms of literature, science, astronomy and cinema, Cornell made deeply personal, poetic works in collage and box assemblage.

Not many of the Cornell collages in this show would elicit much zeal on their own, but all of them profit from the Cornell mystique--that of a man who lived quietly, modestly, folding his yearnings and fantasies into art.

Part of Johnson’s art practice consisted of “mail art,” sent to his friends and personal heroes. Cornell figured prominently in that pantheon. Johnson’s collages here--which incorporate Cornell’s silhouette, a drawing of a daffodil placed on his grave and a scrap identified as an inkblot found in the artist’s trash--double as fan letters and private scrapbook pages, giddy meditations on the master’s glory.

Baron’s work stands apart from Cornell’s and Johnson’s in its reliance on an abstract symbology rather than on recognizable snippets from the wider culture. Baron moved to the U.S. from Germany as a teenager during World War II--though, not knowing this, one would still be able to discern a current of loss and melancholy in the work.

Her collages consist of scraps of fabric and fragments of her own etchings, inked notations just beyond decipherability and lines drawn as if to stitch all the pieces together. The colors in them seem weary, and the textures, too, as if their lives had already been fully lived before Baron invited them back in for another round.

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Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 659-8256, through July 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Dots and DabsThat Cast a Spell

Like the exclamation points that follow every comment, however mundane, in comic-strip speech, Cadence Giersbach’s painting style forces exuberance onto ordinary subjects. The New York-based Giersbach, in her first L.A. solo show at Sandroni Rey, paints a pair of palm trees against a wall, a topiary bush, a parked airplane, a girl with tulips. None of the scenes is remarkable in itself, but Giersbach renders them in a way that’s at least momentarily dazzling.

The images are broken down into discrete color forms, thousands of them, from tiny amoeba shapes to broad areas. Like peas and applesauce on a child’s plate, the colors touch but don’t blend. The eye and the brain do the work reflexively to mix the colors and create the illusion of depth, as in digital imaging, where information is broken down into tiny constituent parts, and also in the painting tradition of pointillism.

Giersbach’s clean-edged shapes and slick enamel surfaces call to mind another tradition as well--the amateur practice of painting by numbers.

Certain passages in the paintings buzz with the friction between abstract flatness and coherence into recognizable shapes. Giersbach attempts to exploit the tension further by extending the imagery beyond the edges of the panels. Two of the paintings here continue in monochrome onto the wall, where the forms dissolve entirely into pure design. It’s a snazzy gimmick, but it doesn’t make up for the paintings’ lack of real substance.

Only one painting, “Little Girl (With Tulips),” contains enough internal tension to merit long attention. The scene is skewed as if seen through a distorting lens, so the space behind the child appears warped and stretched, a bizarre taffy of khaki, slate, mint and lavender. The girl herself lacks edges separating her from the background, and that continuity clashes enough with our experience of solids and space to make for a curious, hallucinogenic spell worth prolonging.

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Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney, Venice, (310) 392-3404, through July 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.