E-Mail This Article to a Friend ART ATTACK Seeing the big picture BY CAMILLE DODERO

What the billion-dollar Fidelity Investments engine (or at least a tiny little speck of it on Summer Street) has sown, the small Waltham photography gallery Panopticon will reap. Every month, Fidelity’s advertising division, appropriately called "the Agency," invites local artists to hang their work in the Summer Street building’s Fourth Floor Gallery, a corporate corridor accessible only to employees. By calling this benevolent program a "show," the Agency claims, it’s supporting local artists. Yet there’s almost no outside exposure — guests can view the collection just once a month, during an invitation-only, two-hour reception, so essentially the division is just wrangling hungry artists into redecorating its hallway for free.

But even for free, November’s "Cuba: There Is Light and Shadow" wasn’t what gallery manager Tanya Dempsey had in mind for her office. (Dempsey didn’t return calls for comment.) Ten days before Wayland photographer and show curator Linda Hirsch had been scheduled to hang the collection of about 50 photos, Dempsey abruptly rejected many images — some of which had been "approved" months in advance — because they were too "provocative" for the corporate environment. Dempsey rejected the images because they illustrated political, religious, and sexual themes, along with "poverty tones" — subject matters that had never, until then, been declared off-limits.

Hirsch, who’s been photographing Jewish Cubans in the small community of Cienfuegos for years, can’t understand the problem. The "poverty tones" weren’t the guilt-tripping Sally Struthers sort — no twig-legged, dirt-flecked toddlers getting dive-bombed by gnats. Instead, the "taboo" pictures were innocuous, like Don Gurewitz’s color photo of a smiling woman tending to resting toddlers in a happy-looking orphanage, and Blake Fritch’s roadside scene of an older woman seemingly rendered headless by an orange pot beside her on a table. The picture with alleged "sexual undertones" was also taken by Fritch: a young girl leans over a concrete barrier while an ocean wind reveals her baggy white underpants (for the record, there were more startling crotch shots in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade).

As for Hirsch, all her pieces were initially dismissed because they were "religious," including one of rabbis reading beneath a Star of David flag, and another of three Jewish boys sitting on a planter, two wearing Red Sox hats. The latter photo was rejected because the boys wore necklaces with tiny Jewish charms. "You wouldn’t have known these people were Jewish," says Hirsch. "It was a very dismissive, broad brush. The inconsistency was bizarre."

Hirsch and the other artists decided to cancel "Cuba: There Is Light and Shadow" since it had dwindled from around 50 photos to 21. But when Tony Decaneas saw the show via computer, through a mutual friend, he invited Hirsch to hold it at Panopticon, his Waltham gallery, this spring. Decaneas calls the show "a comprehensive cross section of a living Cuba" and doesn’t consider the material provocative. "By my definition, no, I don’t think that there’s anything in the show that’s provocative." But he sees Fidelity’s prerogative. "If you’re in the business of investments, it’s understandable that you really wouldn’t want to present poverty. It’s kind of a contradiction — and an uncomfortable one."

Fidelity spokesman Vin Loporchio says Dempsey wasn’t acting under corporate policy. This was the choice of the advertising division, individuals who, Loporchio says, "need to make decisions about which pieces they want to exhibit based upon their environment." But what was the real problem? Is it that Jewish iconography has many emotional implications? Or that communists are scary? Or that poor people are even scarier? Loporchio responds, "In general, [the Agency] needs to make judgments based on what their colleagues would like to see. And they did that."