Rugged, feminine side

Photographer Judy Dater has worked in black and white, color, hand-painted prints and collage, but throughout her career she has remained fascinated with one theme: exploring the nuances of the feminine.

“I was always taking photos of women,” explains Dater, who first took up photography in the early 1960s. “It was a subject I found endlessly interesting from the beginning.”

The show “Portraits of Women, 1964-2004,” which opened recently at the Michael Dawson Gallery in Larchmont Village, revisits four decades of Dater’s photos and marks the first major local viewing of her work in many years.

“I’m excited to have it all in one place,” Dater says. “It’s going to be interesting to view everything at once.”

Dater, who was born in Los Angeles, studied under Jack Welpott, an accomplished photographer who would later become her husband and collaborator. In 1975, Dater and Welpott published “Women and Other Visions,” a book that featured black-and-white portraits of a variety of females -- friends and family culled from an assortment of ages and social strata. The two artists delineated their work by marking each image with male or female symbols.

One of Dater’s most famous images from this time, “Imogen Cunningham and Twinka, Yosemite, 1974,” has found its way into numerous textbooks and onto the front of popular postcards. The photo features another of Dater’s mentors, photographer Imogen Cunningham, who at the time the shot was taken was well into her 90s. In Dater’s image, Cunningham, an antique camera slung around her neck, peeks around a towering redwood tree, surprising a shy, doe-like nude (pop model Twinka, batting her eyelashes with a whimsical false modesty).

An amusing but powerful statement on age and womanhood, “Imogen and Twinka” is one of the many reasons why Dater emerged as a powerful artistic voice within the feminist movement.

“The thing about Dater’s work is that she’s been consistent in her exploration of women, even when she’s taking photos of men,” says Donna Stein, an art historian and senior development associate at CalArts. “There’s always a probing there, as if she’s trying to find herself within her subjects.”

Beginning in the late 1970s, Dater made a marked leap from dreamy anthropological portraiture to a new phase of intense self-exploration. The result was a large body of self-portraits, photographs that sit alongside her more recent collage and hand-painted work on display at the Dawson Gallery.

The series was inspired by Dater’s relocation to New Mexico, where she constructed self-portraits against the harshly beautiful backdrop of the Southwest. In them, Dater’s lone form is somehow stoic, as if she were the last person left on Earth.

“I felt that way a little bit when I was there,” says Dater, who now lives in Berkeley. “I had left my life behind when I went to live in New Mexico. I almost felt invisible at that time, being so far away and in a whole new environment. I wanted to do the Georgia O’Keeffe fantasy. I was living in a really isolated spot and I felt really isolated. I needed to do those photos, in a way, to keep my sanity. But that isolation, it gave me a freedom to try something else. As a result, it was a really very lonely, but also a very productive, time.”

Dater’s New Mexico images are intensely personal yet iconically feminine, with moods ranging from vulnerable to powerful. In one, her nude body lies tucked in fetal position amid a scattering of sand and sharp pebbles. In another, Dater stands under an enormous rock, one arm outstretched, palm pressed against stone, as if she alone were supporting its glacier-hewn bulk.

“I guess I would say that these pictures are at the heart of my work,” says Dater, 63, “or how I feel about my work, or how I feel about how I approach photography.”

“She’s continued to search,” says Stein, “and that search changes as she changes as a person. She searches for what it is that is distinctive about the feminine, and she tries to expose both the outward and inward of her subjects, the emotional interior and how that manifests itself in the exterior.”

“They’re certainly the most personal photographs,” Dater says of her New Mexico series. “My work has always come from a very personal, interior psychological place, but these are some of the best examples of those kinds of feelings. They were very interior. In fact, they were so personal at the beginning, I wasn’t actually intending to show them. I was doing them for myself. But in the end, I really began to like them and wanted to share them. My hope was that everyone could relate to the emotions they express.”

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Judy Dater

Portraits of Women, 1964-2004

Where: Michael Dawson Gallery, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays to Saturdays; Mondays and Tuesdays by appointment

Ends: Jan. 22

Cost: Free

Info: (323) 469-2186, Ext. 3; or www.dawsonbooks.com