‘Thin’ exposes chilling self-hatred

Opportunities abound for the documentarian of human misery: war, hunger, poverty, homelessness, domestic violence, abuse. For the “concerned photographer,” a term coined in the late 1960s to describe a commitment to conscientious, humane witness, it’s a matter of deciding where to turn, what to focus on and how.

Lauren Greenfield, a photojournalist based in L.A. and a member of the photo agency VII, has directed her attention since the early ‘90s to phenomena that arise out of our culture of excess -- problems born of economic affluence and social privilege, media saturation and the societal drive toward immediate gratification. She chronicles the external manifestations of mainstream America’s compromised soul.

Her first major project, published in the book “Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood,” examined sexually accelerated, artifice-happy youth culture.

“Girl Culture,” her next project, expanded upon one facet of the first: body image as expression of identity and reflection of cultural expectation.

Her newest work zooms in closer still. “Thin” takes a look at residents of the Renfrew Center, a Florida treatment facility for women with eating disorders.

The book “Thin” was recently published by Chronicle Books, and “Thin,” the documentary, is scheduled to air at 9 p.m. Nov. 14 on HBO. The large color photographs from the project on view at Fahey / Klein Gallery constitute no more than a slender slice from the overall enterprise.

They are not meant to stand alone, nor do they communicate consistently well in this context. They need the partnership of words, and they get that brilliantly in the book, in the form of personal narratives and diary entries by the subjects, commentary by medical and sociological experts and a tone-setting introduction by Greenfield.

Although the project seems to fit easily on a continuum with her other work, Greenfield asserts that societal conditions are only part of the story of “Thin”; mental illness is the real issue.

The text in the book fleshes out the particularities of each woman’s interior struggle.

The pictures describe external appearances that clash mightily with their self-perceptions. Where we see famine-level emaciation, they see an ideal not quite reached. We see -- quite literally in the portrait of Ata with her arms clasped overhead -- the attenuated limbs and knobby joints of an Egon Schiele figure; they see in themselves the ample, overloaded bodies of a Rubens.

One of the most captivating pairs of pictures shows a young woman named Aiva on her first day of treatment and 10 weeks later, upon completion. A barbed reversal of the diet ad pitch, the “before” photograph shows 16-year-old Aiva looking like a bony, angry preteen. “After,” the angles of her face have softened, her chest, torso and arms have filled out, and she has blossomed into a healthy (and happier) looking young woman.

A selection of photographs from Greenfield’s previous two series is also on view at the gallery, and they are pithy evidence of all sorts of cultural distortions having to do with wanting (and having) too much, too fast. They are situational tableaux, intertwining of character, context and action.

The images on view from “Thin” are largely portraits, many taken on the grassy institutional grounds of the Renfrew Center. They introduce the players in this painful saga of self-loathing and self-improvement, but they can’t deliver much more in the way of feeling or fact. A few are chilling in their depiction of the extremes these women have reached through purging and restricting, as well as cutting.

Greenfield’s pictures are intimate and candid. Their authenticity derives from the trust required between photographer and subject, trust that each will deal only in raw truths, and with respect.

The gravity never lets up. But it does edge aside occasionally to make room for irony and even dark humor, as in the photograph of one Renfrew patient with her father, a man with sizable paunch, sagging double chin and a tattoo of the female ideal, a sexy pinup girl, on his forearm.

The pictures are descendants of the work of Mary Ellen Mark and Larry Fink. They’re the findings of an astute cultural anthropologist feeling her way -- and helping us feel ours -- through the familiar and the outrageous, through individual trauma and societal disease.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 934-2250, through Nov. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.faheykleingallery.com.

A soulful look at isolation and loss

A young man sits atop a Manhattan mailbox at night. The white polka dots of his shirt rhyme with the random constellation of lights from apartment windows and headlights behind him.

In another of Yuichi Hibi’s gorgeously melancholy photographs, a wheelchair lies abandoned on a snowy sidewalk. In another, the dark silhouettes of condiment bottles progress rhythmically along a diagonal stretch of coffee shop tables, punctuated at the far end by the figure of a lone customer. Street life reflected on the diner’s front door reads like a filmic overlay, vitality and community projected over an emblem of solitude.

Isolation and loss are palpable throughout the Japanese-born, New York-based artist’s first L.A. show, at Michael Dawson Gallery. Whether the pictures were made in Hibi’s native or adopted country, they feel like the soulful observations of an outsider, ever negotiating the polarity between individual and crowd.

In an image resonant with Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s iconic 1934 picture of men seen from behind, seated at a lunch counter, a working-class ballet of backs, Hibi shows the backs of a group of Japanese salary men gathering for drinks after work.

Their crisp suits echo each other and merge with the establishment’s noren, short curtain flaps that cover their heads and cancel out their individual identities the same way a dense strip of shadow blots out the men’s upper bodies in Bravo’s picture.

Hibi’s vision has affinities as well with the “stray dog” aesthetic of Daido Moriyama and Robert Frank, about whom he’s made a small book. Grainy, bleak, dominated by the inky black of wet asphalt, the pictures (all made in 1992-93) form a deeply affecting chronicle of Hibi’s private navigation of the public realm.

Michael Dawson Gallery, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., (323) 469-2186, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.michaeldawsongallery.com.

Grace in nature, natural elements

Swedish artist Tina Eskilsson makes her U.S. debut in a pleasant whisper of a show at Sixteen:One. Watercolors of polar bears sniffing and walking the icy ground are lovely enough, the bulky grace of the creatures defined in shadows of green and fuchsia. A sequence of small ink paintings of a pale gray bear making its way “Seventy Miles a Day” through blank white space has a gentle appeal as well. But the main event of Eskilsson’s show is her installation “Ice Light and Shadows.”

In a dedicated space, she has suspended five conical icicles over clear plexiglass boxes and trained a halogen lamp on each pairing. The setup is reminiscent of early sculptural / sound work by Mineko Grimmer. As Grimmer’s suspended chunks of ice melted, they shed pebbles onto piano strings, each sculpture performing a chance-driven score a la John Cage.

Eskilsson’s installation is simpler, more slight. Its interest comes from the objects’ shifting states: solid becoming liquid, clear elements casting dense shadows. As the icicles melt, their drops reverberate in the troughs and send quivering, patterned shadows onto the walls and ceiling. Time, gravity and temperature grow more pronounced. With its single chair, the installation feels like a meditation chamber, where one can contemplate the aqueous equivalent of an hourglass.

Sixteen:One, 2116 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 450-4394, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

Getting in touch with Hollywood

Juliao Sarmento’s collage-like work wreaks mildly amusing havoc with the mind’s reflexive urge to seek connections. Sarmento at once invites and thwarts the impulse, using strategies of fragmentation, interruption and discontinuity familiar, especially, from the work of John Baldessari.

The canvases and works on paper at Christopher Grimes have smudgy surfaces and a raw, conditional feel, but their appealing tactile qualities serve a fairly bland Conceptual program.

Sarmento, from Portugal, brings together in his work photographs, dialogue and character names from Hollywood films of the 1940s and ‘50s. He names each canvas after an actress and silk-screens on the surface the first name of her character in a particular film together with her first spoken line, running like a fortune-cookie message along the top or bottom edge.

In all of the paintings the same generic woman, in different postures, is drawn in graphite. Shown from hips to shoulders only, in unbuttoned dress and pearls, she is a cipher, as cryptic an abbreviation as the text fragments.

The drawings use the same films as source material and combine a grainy copy of a still of the female lead, her last lines (cut and pasted) and a pair of hands enacting in sign language some action or emotion. Contradiction and ambiguity reign as the eye and mind rebound from text to image and back again.

The work engages but doesn’t fully gratify, an effect fitting to art that tampers with legibility, frustrates narrative and tweaks correspondences -- art by a well-established trickster.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Nov. 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cgrimes.com.