Eisenhower views of turbulent ‘60s

The ‘60s are back. Today, that tumultuous decade of free love, cheap drugs and hard-won personal liberties inspires more artists, designers and musicians than ever before.

Even august institutions, such as the J. Paul Getty Trust, are not immune to its do-your-own-thing idealism. At the Getty Center, a summer group show pays playful homage to an age whose repercussions are still felt in the present’s best impulses.

“Strange Days: Photographs From the Sixties by Winogrand, Eggleston, and Arbus” features 81 black-and-white pictures from the Getty’s permanent collection.

Matter-of-factly arranged in four manageable galleries, the exhibition demonstrates that strangeness comes in all shapes and sizes.

First, it’s strange to visit the designer campus on a manicured hilltop in tony Brentwood and see an exhibition titled after a 1967 album by the Doors. Fronted by Jim Morrison, the band played rollicking numbers whose emotional tenor ricocheted between bemused detachment and intoxicating dread. Specializing in psychological ambivalence, Morrison was a poet of urban bohemia who lived fast, died young and left a legacy of taking things one step too far -- and then some.

Such forget-the-consequences abandon is nowhere to be found in the well-heeled exhibition. In fact, the strangest thing about the accessible, deeply engaging show is how 1950s it feels.

The mores and manners of the Eisenhower era live on in its fine selection of modestly scaled silver-prints. All of its photographers worked in styles that are strait-laced, even square. No flashy colors, psychedelic designs, theatrical setups or chemical manipulation in the darkroom distract from their clear-eyed Realism.

Plus, the majority of the people and places they depict are anything but hip. Most of their crisp images focus on ordinary folks in everyday settings doing run-of-the-mill things. By today’s standards, many of the prints look quaint or charming.

The strangeness that takes shape throughout the show usually does so when two or more worlds collide in a single image, pitting, say, generations, classes, sexes or other social groups against one another.

For example, the first gallery, which is separated from the three larger galleries by a hallway, features 13 photographs by Garry Winogrand (1928-84). Most appeared in his 1975 book “Women Are Beautiful.” All were shot between 1960 and 1971, in New York, Texas and New Mexico.

In “Bethesda Fountain Area, Central Park, New York City,” a self-possessed woman in a transparent fishnet blouse strides through a sea of men, many of whom gawk, nudge their neighbors and smile with innocent delight. The electrifying energy exuded by the confident model, and picked up by everyone within range, crackles throughout Winogrand’s stunningly simple picture.

The same goes for the dozen others around it. One shows an elderly businessman on Park Avenue, chatting with a young lady in a sundress. Her verve is palpable. Winogrand captures the enchanting magic by snapping the shutter just as the formally attired gentleman taps his heel on the sidewalk, as if kicking up his feet to the jaunty melody she sets off in his imagination.

The rest of the pictures are attentive to the details of attitude and gesture that transform otherwise unremarkable moments into instances of extraordinary richness. Whether the women in these consummately composed photographs are riding bicycles, pushing strollers, eating pretzels, laughing joyously, lighting cigarettes or riding buses, Winogrand makes it look as if what they’re doing is holy -- part of an informal ritual that brings eternal virtues down to earth with sensuality and grace.

In the next gallery, he turns his eye for concise compositions to the pell-mell pageantry of the streets of New York, Dallas and Los Angeles. The loosening of sexual mores expands to include a rambunctious range of social interactions.

At a street corner in downtown L.A., a thug in a cheap suit and a lanky traffic cop flank three women waiting for the light to turn green. The outfits and expressions of the five unsuspecting citizens suggest so many far-flung stories that Winogrand’s surreptitious portrait makes even the wildest police lineup look boring.

Another image portrays a formally dressed couple standing on the deck of a Hudson River tour boat. Surrounded by dozens of casually dressed sightseers (though none wears jeans), the pair are so out of place that they seem to have been beamed down from outer space.

In a third, blinding, extraterrestrial light shines out from behind three young women wearing carefully coiffed hairdos and miniskirts. They strut past a man slumped in a wheelchair and a bench full of women and children waiting for the bus at Hollywood and Vine. Unimpressed as only a kid can be, a boy perched at the end of the bench takes in the glamour and tragedy as if they go hand in hand, and are a regular part of life.

Winogrand is at his best when he depicts ordinary folks doing things in public. In contrast, William Eggleston’s specialty is the roadside scenery against which such daily dramas play out. The next gallery features 22 black-and-white photographs he shot between 1965 and 1972, in Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri and Louisiana.

At their most extreme, Eggleston’s unforgiving prints treat people as props. Washing, sweeping and cleaning up, they are generic symbols of the mundane labors performed in diners, offices and motels across the country.

Through Eggleston’s alienating lens, buildings, billboards and automobiles have more personality than human beings. One of the bluntest yet most evocative images is a close-up of a telephone pole, whose scarred surface slices the empty street of abandoned storefronts in two. Another picture treats the dual left headlights of a Ford Torino as the eyes of a sleek, mysterious beast.

To drive home the idea that these images of American objects are portraits, the 64-year-old photographer has shot the sign outside the front door of a small-town portrait studio. It’s vintage Eggleston. The hard-boiled composition doesn’t pretend to take viewers inside, where intimate details might be revealed. Instead, it leaves us in the street, amid familiar surroundings that suddenly seem to be suffused with forlorn pathos.

Being out of place, even while at home, is the feeling Eggleston’s strongest works embody. In one of a handful of interiors, his smiling wife and yawning mother lack the tangibility of the television that sits between them. In another, an extremely tall man towers over the stop sign at a nondescript intersection. With very few clues about scale and perspective, it takes a while to figure out why the unassuming image is so odd. Even when you do, its strange pang doesn’t diminish.

Strangeness comes full circle in the last gallery, where 23 prints that Diane Arbus (1923-71) made between 1958 and 1971 hang. Each is a world unto itself.

Except for a big Christmas tree crammed into the corner of a tract home’s living room, and an eerie night view of Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland, all are portraits. Every one is stranger than the last. And there’s nothing simple about the expressions or body language of Arbus -- sitters, who include smiling nudists, sneering immigrants, jaded suburbanites, dour pensioners and weary transvestites.

Poseurs and pretenders may populate these pictures, but Arbus peels away the layers of masquerade to reveal their hearts and souls. In one, a dapper dwarf kicks back in his hotel room, the lazy lids of his sad eyes failing to hide the pain behind his tight smile. In another, a couple of unflappable senior citizens, dressed as king and queen of a charity ball, look as if they’ve seen too much of life to be bothered by their ridiculous outfits. In a third, the sweet-faced father of a young family from Brooklyn appears to be worse off than a trapped animal, too clueless to see the grim fate that awaits him but too sensitive to stay that way for long.

The collective portrait that emerges from “Strange Days” is of a nation in which strangeness is not an anomaly that pops up every once in a while. It’s a fundamental part of American identity. In the United States, misfits and weirdos do not merely rub shoulders with the best and the brightest, they make up a large part of their numbers. Ours is a country that’s strange all the way through.

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‘Strange Days’

What: “Strange Days: Photographs From the Sixties by Winogrand, Eggleston, and Arbus”

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Closed Mondays

Ends: Oct. 5

Price: Free, but parking is $5 per car. Weekday reservations required

Contact: (310) 440-7300