Headlong into the contradictions

Among the Appalachians of eastern Kentucky, Shelby Lee Adams is known as “the one that does them picture books, you know, the picture man.” Among commentators on photography, Adams’ name elicits a more loaded, layered response, generating questions that cut to the heart of the photographic enterprise of social reportage.

Do his pictures of snake handlers and child brides educate us -- or, exploit them?

Consider, for instance, an image shot in 1987, part of Adams’ captivating “Appalachian Lives” show at Fahey/Klein Gallery. The picture follows portraiture conventions established centuries ago in painting: The subject is centrally located and surrounded by indicators of environment, wealth, status and personality. Here, a woman sits on a wooden folding chair with a bottle-sucking little boy on her lap. Tired-looking but hard to age, she could be the child’s mother but just as easily his grandmother.

A pretty young woman standing to one side, smoking a cigarette, could be the intervening generation. Snaking wires and crumpled trash lie strewn about the raw ground where the older woman sits. A wheelbarrow filled with old cans borders her on one side, a few rickety trailers in the distance frame her on the other. The woman’s dour expression and dilapidated yard speak plainly enough of poverty -- but there’s more: Adams has her sitting at a slight angle, so that her shoulder faces forward, exposing a simply lettered tattoo that reads, “Born to loose.”

In another picture, we look down onto a man’s lap, where a Bible lies open to an underlined passage from Luke: “They shall take up serpents ... they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Upon that same page curls a snake. On the facing page rests the believer’s hand, his fingers misshapen and gnarled.

Or consider the image of a young, potbellied man sitting on his couch. To one side crouches his sister, a grown woman of obviously childlike intelligence, her hand on his knee in a gesture of dependency. On the other side sits the man’s new bride, a stringy blond girl.

In each of these pictures Adams has not just packed the frame with textural information but also with conditions that invite pity and contradictions that invite judgment. He’s focused on manifestations of ignorance, whether rooted in poor schooling, strong faith or local custom. The soft-core sensationalism that results is both troubling and irresistible.

From the beginning, photographers have ventured into foreign territory and returned with visual evidence of the exotic, allowing us at home the role of effortless traveler, unobtrusive voyeur. When fascination mixes with condescension, though, a power balance shifts. The photographer seems cruel, and we, as viewers, feel complicit.

The power dynamic between photographer and subject can rarely be spelled out with the precision of a mathematical equation. Gray area prevails, especially with someone like Adams, who is both insider and outsider to the community he photographs. He was born in Kentucky but has long lived elsewhere (Connecticut, currently), returning several months each year to photograph. The pictures emerge from first encounters as well as long-standing relationships. They are, as critic Vicki Goldberg writes in Adams’ latest book, the photographer’s way of reckoning with his own history.

Over the decades that Adams has photographed in eastern Kentucky, the region has gentrified slightly, and Adams’ own response to the place seems to have shed some of its rougher edges too. The three pictures described above all date from the 1980s. This show (amazingly, his first in L.A.) includes work up to the present.

Adams has continued in the same vein, making portraits and family scenes of great intensity and curiosity -- many depicting Appalachians with their animals -- but he’s also made room for unapologetic tenderness toward his subjects. In the end, these are great pictures.

Visually, they are tightly composed and alive. They’re emotionally complex and intellectually challenging. The first generation of photojournalists implored us, nearly a century ago, to wrestle out the bias in pictures presented as documents by asking of them: Who benefits? Adams embraces the subjectivity in his work, even when it’s uncomfortable. Happily, we’re the ones who benefit from these pictures, which stretch our vision beyond its natural reach and force questions upon us that are easier left unasked.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 934-2250, through Oct. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Art of portraiture in concentrate

Jim Torok’s diminutive self-portraits at Daniel Weinberg Gallery start off both maddening and amazing. In each of the 14 tiny panels (ranging from just 2 to 6 inches per side), Torok clings to a single format: a frontal head-and-shoulders view of himself, wearing ordinary clothes and a consistently neutral expression. In some he wears a white T-shirt, in others a collared shirt of a solid color, usually with a T-shirt underneath.

The backgrounds are unarticulated, either eggshell white or inky black. As portals to the soul, these portraits seem stubbornly closed. And yet, how thoughtfully Torok attends to the surface.

The Brooklyn-based artist endows these little images with the gem-like beauty of devotional icons. Against the dark background an orange shirt looks radiant. Set off against a blue denim shirt, Torok’s gray-blue eyes take on extra luster. The fine, discrete brushstrokes of the paintings, in oil on polymer resin, recall the delicacy of Renaissance works in egg tempera. The individual tints and gestures cohere, somewhat alchemically, into utterly convincing presences.

By adopting a rigorously uniform approach, Torok shifts attention away from the personality of the sitter to the process of the exercise. These don’t just resemble devotional paintings; they embody the devotional act of close observation and recording.

Torok has another artistic life making cartoon drawings about, well, the artistic life. The humor of those panels and the sobriety of the works here seem worlds apart, but Torok’s basic subject remains the same: art-making, in all of its self-obsessed hilarity, concentration and wonder.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 954-8425, through Oct. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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At play where art meets design

Art and design worlds flirt heavily with one another these days, softening the bias against function in contemporary art. Daniel Hale’s charming work at the new Xing Gallery in Chinatown celebrates this hybrid condition with the unabashed enthusiasm of a spirited puppy.

It’s hard not to smile while perusing this show. The furniture and sculpture are easy to enjoy, taking their cue from American folk art and assemblage, with a little poetry thrown in.

There are desks, tables, chairs, hanging light fixtures and coat racks, giving the slightly crowded gallery the feel of a country antiques shop dense with discoveries. Hale, who works in Napa Valley, primarily uses wood, painted and faux-distressed. Cutesy little flourishes like carved lunettes and cherubic faces get grating after a while, but Hale has a spare, poignant side as well.

It shines in a zinc-topped table with a phrase from Edna St. Vincent Millay running along its edge like a ready-made conversation. A daybed sheltered by an airy wooden framework is similarly elegant.

Most fun are the sculptures -- a tabletop figure of a bull and a hanging bird -- fashioned of cast-off common objects, like eyeglasses and doorknobs. Hale uses the worn handle of a pitchfork as the bull’s spine and the tool’s curved tines as the animal’s horns. For the body he’s created a screen of sorts, a network of objects connected by wire and wood -- broken bottle tops, mussel shell, wine cork, can opener. The structure brings to mind Adolph Gottlieb’s “Pictograph” paintings of the 1940s, made more accessible and fresh.

Xing Gallery, 945 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 626-1984, through Oct. 12. Open Thursday through Sunday.

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A mix of high and low falls flat

Judging by the paintings in Neil Rumming’s first U.S. show, the young British artist’s guiding philosophy runs something like this: If you can’t be wise, be clever. If you can’t paint well, paint large. And if you haven’t yet found a vision of your own, borrow someone else’s.

It’s a credo that all too many young postmodernists follow, schooled as they are in theatrical pastiche. Rumming’s paintings at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery are so flat-footed that they almost read as parody. Each is packed with images from high and low sources (art and advertising, naturally) and in an wide range of styles: Photo-Realist, Keith Haring pictographic, Jason Martin painterly, etc.

“The Measure of Fear” is typical. An hourglass shape dominates the 8-foot-high canvas, with a green candle appearing to burn at its waist. Above rise two proficiently painted cobras, and below swirls an abstracted snakeskin mosaic. All this in a sickly palette of gold, emerald, lime and pink.

In Rumming’s other paintings, kitsch images of diving dolphins mix with Sony PlayStation ads, tie-dye patterns and faux marbling. Driven by spectacle, abundance and effect, the work lands somewhere between B-movie and cheap buffet.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 525-1755, through Oct. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.