New Focus

Whatever other weak areas there might be in the Ventura County art scene, photography is a medium in good health, available at venues near you. Spaces such as the Nichols Gallery in Santa Paula and the Atget Gallery in Ventura have made photography exhibitions their mission. Now we can add the Janss/Nichols Gallery, an impressive new venue in Thousand Oaks that further ups the ante.

The Janss/Nichols Gallery is especially notable in its presentation of pillars of the art form. This is the only place in Ventura County where you’ll find pieces by the likes of Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Bernhard and Wynn Bullock under one roof. It’s an impressive series of sights.

The gallery’s saga thus far lies embedded in the name itself. Behind it is local photographer Larry Janss, whose work has a broad reputation and has been seen in various settings around the county--including having his imagery of the Grand Canyon projected as the New West Symphony performed Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite” last fall.

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Janss has also been an avid photography collector and has long dealt with Scott Nichols, who runs a photography gallery in San Francisco. The pair have teamed up to create this Southern California outpost, and it’s well worth seeking out.

The roles of collector and artist--a good selection of whose work hangs in the back of the gallery--intersect in this inaugural show, “Vintage Themes, New Territories.” Plans for future shows here include one focusing on the Westons and another on significant female photographers.

Not accidentally, at the gallery’s entrance we find works by two of the famed Westons, clearly an influence on Janss and many other landscape-oriented photographers. Brett Weston’s gift for mining abstract beauty in tightly cropped vignettes from nature is well-represented here, in images of kelp, a torn leaf from Hawaii, or in “Leaves and Palms,” with its shimmering surfaces and voluptuous curves. Edward Weston’s “Maudell Weston, Carmel,” juxtaposes its nude, dark-skinned woman against the wavy white expanse of a sandy hill, a study in contrasting hue and texture.

Nudes and nature also interact, in sometimes clever, playful ways, in the works of Wynn Bullock. Nude female forms are seen tucked almost imperceptibly into a landscape scenario, draped along a log or half-obscured through a window screen in a rustic house. In a more straightforward portrait, unclad mother and infant are captured in a tender embrace.

The nude tradition is dealt yet more creative twists in the wry, arresting imagery of Ruth Bernhard. Bodies are gently twisted into boxes or coyly placed behind veils, showing perhaps a refreshing female perspective on the female nude, that staple of male-dominated photography. Also on view are some of Bernhard’s conceptual images from some dream realm, such as “Creation,” with a mannequin’s hand holding a doll head against a painted landscape backdrop.

Imogen Cunningham, too, brought new life to the nude study, as we see in the double exposure “Dream Walking,” with a nude layered behind a picture from the woods. Cunningham’s “My Father at Ninety,” by contrast, is a frank and loving portrait of a proud patriarch.

Among the Ansel Adams works on display are such classics as “Moonlight Over Hernandez” and “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome,” a masterfully artful vision of the Yosemite landmark that has launched a million postcard images. But there is a different, disarming poetry behind Adams’ “Interior of Tumacacori Mission,” with its almost ethereal impression of a chapel’s interior, its decaying walls seeming to yield mystical secrets.

Janss’ own section of the gallery reveals a photographer who may nod to the influence of others but with a voice of his own, as well. His landscape work savors the ephemeral mystery of clouds and milky, rushing water--as in “Havasu Falls”--or the oddly sculpted rock formation of “Floating Rock, Antelope Canyon.”

Other commanding images seen in the gallery include Dorothea Lange’s gritty and truthful images of migrant farmworkers and their ad hoc villages during the Great Depression. One of the most striking images, though, carries both socio-historical and purely visual messages: “Gas Station, Kern County, CA,” is a smartly composed shot with no figures in sight and a sign scrawled in block letters, reading, “THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY DON’T LET THE BIG MEN TAKE IT AWAY.”

Its sense of desolation is conveyed not through careworn faces but through gestures of frustration and paranoia. Therein lies one of the innate powers of photography: to capture a moment in time while glimpsing larger truths.

DETAILS

“Vintage Themes, New Territories,” through April 23 at the Janss/Nichols Gallery, 1408 Thousand Oaks Blvd., in Thousand Oaks. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-3 p.m., Tues-Fri. or by appointment; 497-3720.