AROUND THE GALLERIES

By Leah Ollman

June 26, 2009 12 AM PT

Photographer Eugene Richards has chronicled poverty, drug addiction, aging and death. He’s documented emergency room medicine, his first wife’s struggle with cancer, the toll of river blindness and pediatric AIDS. A former member of the Magnum photo agency, he’s received just about every award given to photojournalists, published more than a dozen books and produced several short films.

There’s an urgency to the style and subject matter of his work, which makes his recent photographs of abandoned structures in the West and Midwest seem, at first, a dramatic departure. The series, which the Brooklyn-based artist worked on over the course of 3 1/2 years, is also his first body of work in color. A selection of 26 pictures from “The Blue Room” is on view at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Richards’ first L.A. show in more than a decade.

The images are deeply moving meditations on absence, ruin and the passage of time. Though his work of the last 30 years has captured all manner of vital commotion, these scenes are steeped in prolonged stillness. Not a single human being appears within them, yet they are profoundly humanistic.

They too tell of struggle and tragedy, tenacity, fragility and loss. It’s not a stretch to say these pictures also have an urgency about them, even as they record vacant rooms that are changing only at the pace of natural decay. The urgency has to do with preservation, with the importance of knowing our collective history through visual records -- in this case, of lives lived and places once occupied.

Richards made the photographs in North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Arkansas and New Mexico. It’s not clear when the homes in the pictures were abandoned or why, and Richards doesn’t volunteer the information in his titles (which give just location and date) or in the short text published with a fuller set of pictures in the book “The Blue Room.”

The images bring to mind some of the grittier environments recorded by Farm Security Administration photographers in the 1930s and early ‘40s, the scrappy, tenuous homes of tenant farmers, especially. But again, Richards gives no context to the dilapidation of these farmhouses, their doors yanked off the hinges, windows broken, curtains ripped, floors carpeted in debris. Some rooms look stripped clean and left to rot. Others still contain personal belongings (spoons, dolls, family photos), the inhabitants having left without time or the means to pack up.

A child’s room is papered in a sprightly alphabet print -- A for smiling apple -- but on the floor lie four small, dead birds. The contrast between promise and defeat is spare and stark.

Another, narrow space painted in cracked and peeling green holds a single bed with a worn mattress. Snow has drifted in through the shattered window and settled in a neat patch across the bed, a stunning metaphor of loneliness made real.

The narrative potential of each image is vast. Richards is generous with tactile clues and atmosphere, and most of all palpable texture.

He shoots down onto the floor of one room strewn with shoes: leather shoes, boots, with and without laces, with and without mates. Scattered among them are some cracked record albums, yellowed album sleeves and soft-bound books open to musical scores. One book page diagraming the “Figure Eight Stroke” on a guitar lies near a pair of ice skates, setting loose a rhyme of related motions. The picture reads like a novella not quite fixed to the page, an assembly of textures, memories and implied characters.

Richards practices a different mode of storytelling in this series, one that demands restraint, that respects emptiness, vacancy. The power of the pictures derives from multiple sources -- fiction, cinema, still life and, always, social documentation. One other tradition he extends in this body of work is that of the death portrait, for what are these rooms if not empty shells whose souls have lifted free?

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 934-2250, through July 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.fahey kleingallery.com

Tasty bites are served on paper

“Draw the Line” is a fine summer group show akin to a meal composed of a succession of small courses. Each of the 50-plus works on paper at Lora Schlesinger Gallery activates the senses with a modestly scaled, intense burst of flavor. No one taste is sustained long enough to tire, bore, overwhelm or numb the palate; the marvelous bites can be savored and the less interesting ones passed over quickly.

Nearly all of the work is representational, with the depiction of people and animals predominating. If that sounds like a recipe for staleness, it’s not. The work ranges from tame to squirmy, and traditional formats, especially of portraiture, prove no inhibition to invention, freshness or vigor.

Among the simplest and yet most vivid pieces are Enjeong Noh’s searingly alive sepia pencil portrait of Salomon Huerta and Peter Alexander’s gorgeous, sumi-like pastel study of a cat.

Lynn Hanson overlays an old AAA map of Southern California, family vacation route drawn in and detailed, with a charcoal rendering of a stealthy, sinuous rattler. The snake, daunting infiltrator of the nostalgic domain, is all deep shadow, pattern and negative space where the map’s own pathways show through. Hugo Crosthwaite’s three graphite drawings fuse character and cartoon, idiosyncratic identity and flat graphic energy. In one of the intriguing snapshots, a man lightly fingers a frog; in another, a half-naked woman in character-cluttered undershorts glances back at us as she inks a large tattoo.

Among the show’s many other high points: Patty Wickman’s tender, almost tessellated drawing of children beside a manzanita; Marianela de la Hoz’s dark metaphoric tableaux; Ed Amundson’s satirical “Cheney Plant #3”; and Sean Sullivan’s needle-fine ink drawing of a knot of organic matter, all root and bark and bud, fissures, crevices and filigree.

Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through July 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.loraschlesinger.com

Danger lurks in every corner

The interior environments in Luis Gispert’s photographs and film at Otero Plassart are carefully calibrated to satisfy: a truck cab outfitted like a gleaming, high-tech cockpit; a pre-adolescent boy’s playroom dimly lighted and project-filled as a man cave. But Gispert’s world is not decorous. The huge color photographs and even more so the 26-minute film titled “Smother” turn slick habitats into staging grounds for visceral threats and a variety of physical and psychic violations.

In each of the deftly manipulated photographs, Gispert perches us more or less in the driver’s seat of a powerful vehicle (semi, fighter plane), facing a landscape or cityscape glazed in romantic sunset hues. The disparate seductions of latent force and precious beauty clash, but the dissonance cancels itself out under the weight of the Brooklyn-based artist’s ultra-smooth technique.

“Smother” too reads as convincing and disturbing but mostly as well crafted.

The film follows a day in the life of an androgynous, bed-wetting boy whose mother is alternately coddling and threatening. It starts with a bad dream and ends with strange and horrific violence. In between play out dramas of vulnerability, innocence and power, sexual predation, the encouragement of Oedipal urges, and spins on Freud’s castration complex.

The work is dense with trespassed boundaries, spilled bodily fluids and misplaced comfort. Though its production values are relatively high, its tone is purposefully muddled, making “Smother,” in the end, more superficially creepy than deeply resonant.

Otero Plassart, 820 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., (323) 951-1068, through July 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.otero plassart.com

Images change (or do they?) in time

Stepping into the project room at Roberts & Tilton is like entering a time capsule. The walls are papered from floor to ceiling with reproductions of Jet magazine’s “Beauty of the Week” feature, dating from the early 1950s nearly to the present. The installation, by Hank Willis Thomas, wraps around you almost entirely, with one strip of wall space left blank like an ellipsis: to be continued . . . .

Thomas typically uses the idioms of advertising and popular culture in his work, and “Black Is Beautiful” is no exception. Jet’s long-running feature pairing swimsuit portraits and brief bios promotes a certain ideal of beauty that, presumably, has changed with the times and the magazine’s editorial stance.

Externals mark some shifts: color printing replaces black-and-white about one-third of the way through the chronological span (the pages aren’t dated); the language of the captions evolves (“black” replaces “Negro,” and so on); bathing suits become skimpier over time; naturals are seen alongside processed hairstyles; bust-waist-hip measurements are eventually dropped from the texts.

Career choices described in the mini-profiles broaden from the feminine stereotypes of two generations ago (nurse, secretary, teacher) to include such unisex professions as banker and Coast Guard officer, but still, aspiring models prevail. After all, this is a page about appearance, not accomplishment.

Thomas doesn’t interpret this array of evidence but instead leaves it to us to determine whether the spectrum of styles and choices represented feels wide or narrow, whether significant social changes (whither the civil rights struggle? the antiwar movement? feminism?) register among these consistently smiling faces, or how the mainstream African American ideal of beauty intersects with the mainstream white ideal. With “Black Is Beautiful,” Thomas provides the means for both celebration and critique and then backs off, prompting us to determine what proportions to assign to each.

Roberts & Tilton, 5801 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 549-0223, through Aug. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.robertsandtilton.com

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