Major League Acquisition : Commentary: The purchase from dealer-collector Robert Freidus is a nice complement to the massive holdings at LACMA and the Getty.

Two significant predictions were made when it was announced in 1984 that the J. Paul Getty Museum had acquired 20,000 photographs in one swoop, including the two most important private collections in the United States, thus establishing a new department in an institution everyone always has their eye on.

One was that the market for photographs, which have always been seen as a specialized art form, had gotten a major boost. The other was that the center of photographic scholarship in America had just taken a decisive tilt from East to West.

Evidence of the accuracy of the first prediction can be seen in the mushrooming of photography dealers during the past decade, including a virtual explosion in Los Angeles. Today, photography galleries here include G. Ray Hawkins, Fahey/Klein, Jan Kesner, Craig Krull, Paul Kopeikin, Stephen Cohen, Peter Fetterman, Gallery RAM and the Gallery of Contemporary Photography, while the new branch of PaceWildenstein includes a separate department for photographs. Added together, this substantial array surpasses the number of notable galleries representing virtually all types of art in most American cities.

As for the prediction of a westward tilt in scholarly depth, the Getty collection has grown to more than 30,000 images, while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s department of photography, also established in 1984, has organized or hosted several notable shows. Now, another major boost has just been given by the Museum of Contemporary Art, with the magnificent news of its acquisition of about 2,100 photographs assembled by former New York dealer and collector Robert Freidus.

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The 60-some volumes that comprise the exceptional Freidus collection include in-depth holdings of work by one European and 10 American artists; the focus is on the documentary genre, especially since World War II. In this it both differs from and complements the Getty’s massive holdings, which concentrate on the 19th and early-20th Centuries, as well as those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which are more diverse and aim to represent a large number of artists.

One way to look at the Freidus collection is as a chronicle of a transformation from a European documentary aesthetic to an American one. Then, another transformation unfolds within that American point of view.

The earliest are a well-known group of 91 heartfelt images of the brothels and streetwalkers of Paris, taken by Brassai in the 1930s. These are followed by 68 prints from the 1940s by Helen Levitt, the great chronicler of children on the scruffy streets of New York.

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Next comes the watershed: “The Americans� (1955-56), in which Swiss-born expatriate Robert Frank portrayed a grim yet thrilling restlessness within the pageant of everyday life in the postwar American colossus. The 85 prints now in MOCA’s collection comprise one of just four extant sets of this extraordinary artistic achievement, and the only one west of the Atlantic seaboard.

Frank’s precedent was also profoundly influential. Multifarious connections can be drawn to the 200 works by Garry Winogrand, 80 by Diane Arbus (posthumously printed), 161 by Danny Lyon and--astoundingly--706 by Lee Friedlander, which date principally from the 1960s and 1970s. (MOCA is now surely a principal repository for Friedlander’s achingly solitary work.)

Similarly, albeit with a distinctly contemporary feel, the work of the two most significant documentarians of the current generation--Larry Clark and Nan Goldin--bring the tradition into the present. The 182 prints by Clark include his widely admired poetic narratives, “Tulsa� and “Teenage Lust,� as well as 50 so-called “outtakes� from them, which haven’t been publicly shown before. And Goldin’s enthusiastically embraced epic of social outcasts and survivors in lower Manhattan, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,� includes all 126 Cibachrome prints.

One considerably less-traveled side-road is also quickly traversed. Roger Mertin and John Pfahl are photographers whose altered landscapes of the 1970s are sometimes described under the rubric of the “new topographics.�

These 33 discrete bodies of work, which correspond to published books by the artists, might be said to represent a well-established photographic viewpoint, long championed by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. MOCA is a very different museum from MOMA, however, and it will be interesting to see what, if anything, the change in context might mean for these works.

MOCA does not segment itself into departments based on mediums--there is no curator of photography, for example--which means that these photographs probably won’t be separated out from the museum’s increasingly important collections of postwar paintings, sculptures and installations. That integration could lead to the kind of provocative, worthwhile shift in interpretation that a tilt in photographic scholarship from East to West can be hoped to bring about.