Deliver us from curators who don’t know when to stop. The roughly 250 photos currently stacked and staggered two-deep around every wall of the ICA’s upper galleries hardly need help. The show includes both oft-shown and seldom-seen prints by such well-knowns as Diane Arbus, Brassaï, Danny Lyon, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, as well as samplings from the archives of less-famous artists like Helen Levitt, Roger Mertin, and John Pfahl — all from the private trove of New York art dealer Robert Freidus, whose collection was purchased by Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1995, with money from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. It’s an enjoyable display, despite its overwhelming scale. Or rather, it would be fun if the MOCA-LA folks had simply divvied up the prints by photographer (as they did for the show’s catalogue), or even grouped by-artist subsets in rough chronological sequence.

Such straightforwardness apparently wasn’t deemed interesting enough by MOCA-LA associate curator Connie Butler. These days, art shows have to be marketed — packaged and gimmicked-up so as to (we can hear the curators expounding over their latte) " appeal to a wider audience " who might find a show titled, say, " Photographs from the Ralph M. Parson’s Foundation Collection " too stodgy. Well, that’s one thing if a curator starts out with a clever concept and then mines the genre for fitting examples. It’s considerably less successful when he/she tries to impose a unintended communality on an existing body of works.

That’s what we have at the ICA, and it’s a shame, because photos that could speak for themselves suffer mightily under the mounting strain of one conceptual stretch after another. The exhibit is titled " The Social Scene " because one thing these pictures more-or-less/generally/sort-of have in common is that they’re more-or-less socially inclined documentary works — i.e. not fashion, not formal portraiture, etc. If the curatorial meddling had stopped there, fine. But, alas, the show’s organizers belabored their sorry concept by subdividing the works into six thematic subsets — " Social Space, " " Character Studies, " " Picture Making, " " Loss of Innocence, " " American Icons, " and " Natural Occurrences " — whose imports range from barely comprehensible to downright bizarre. This superstructure is as irrelevant as it is misguided, and I’d love to tell viewers simply to ignore it. But the " scattered by pseudo-theme " approach is inescapable. It haunts you as you browse the galleries wondering which ineffable notion applies in which room and what this or that photograph has to do with whatever theme and why any given photograph wouldn’t be equally at home in another category. The only practical advice I can offer is that if you can’t ignore the " organization, " at least abandon all hope of making sense of it.

Another quibble: the photos are not identified individually — rather, the IDs are grouped (sometimes with maps and numbers) at random ends of huge expanses of framed prints. As a result, the rooms look beautiful, but this is documentary photography, not speak-for-itself art photography, and the circumstances under which a picture was taken — subject, place, and date — are essential to appreciating the content. You’re not supposed to have to guess, and running back and forth between the plaque and the prints could be dangerous if the gallery gets crowded.

Unfortunately, the show’s configurative disarray also denies the reviewer any logical way of discussing it. I could note a wealth of conspicuous discontinuities — e.g., a 1967 Garry Winogrand London street scene has been filed under " American Icons " ; a set of New York City street documentarian Helen Levitt’s 1942-’45 prints are included with the post-WW2 " Loss of Innocence " grouping — but there’s nothing to be learned from flogging that dead horse. Pretend the show was arranged by photographer . . . or (for all it matters) at random . . . okay?

Some of the earliest work included in " The Social Scene " is by Hungarian-born Brassaï (Gyula Halász, 1899-1984), self-described " nocturnal " chronicler of Paris’s between-wars demi-monde. The posed " candid " café and cabaret scenes, the street portraits of streetwalkers, gendarmes, and street toughs, and the intimate views of off-duty chorines are of a genre and familiar territory, but this group of prints (exhibited helter-skelter throughout several rooms), culled primarily from Brassaï’s The Secret Paris of the 1930s, which was published in 1976, is compelling. In Conchita with sailors in a café on the Place d’Italie (circa 1933) and A Happy Group at the Quatre Saisons (circa 1932), the subjects’ off-camera humanity fights its way through their heavy make-up and over-groomed hair, reinforcing the traditional critical take on Brassaï that he approached the disreputable people he photographed on a mission of celebration, not judgment.

The judgment-versus-celebration issue is a tad more murky when it comes to the work of Diane Arbus (1923-1971). When I first saw her menagerie-world portraiture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1967, I was shocked and puzzled. Years of increasingly numbed public sensibility have deadened the shock, but the puzzlement remains. Arbus herself claimed to be embracing, not exploiting or criticizing, her off-center subjects, but in two of her politically loaded images (both in the ICA show) — Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. (1967), a portrait of a hateful little shit sporting a " Bomb Hanoi " button, and its companion, Patriotic young man with a flag, N.Y.C. (1967), where the look on the subject’s face shouts " I’m an idiot " while the American-flag button on his lapel whispers " I’m Proud " — it’s hard to escape the notion that she was hitting below the belt, albeit to righteous effect. Arbus doesn’t mix well in anthology shows. Her images — even the touching and sympathetic ones — are just too scary to mingle gracefully.

American icon builder Robert Frank is well represented, from his over-shown trademark Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) to more obscure downbeat glimpses of America like U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas (1955) and Department Store — Lincoln, Nebraska (1956). Frank’s prowess as a documentarian is unassailable. The way he flirts with abstraction and exaggerated details separates him from more traditional photographers like Brassaï. But having those two share a gallery does evoke this comparative thought: does Frank’s Kerouackian 1950s work define America for the rest of the world the way Brassaï’s defines vintage Paris for Americans? The two photographers may not have much in common, but that’s a good question.

Lee Friedlander, grandmaster of juxtaposition, refreshes whatever wall he’s on, making everything believable, ironic, and somehow comforting through relative proximity. Eras and world views blend in his photographs. A doughboy statue guards an unthreatened strip of ’70s storefronts in Stamford, Connecticut; Fighting 69th chaplain Father Francis Patrick Duffy’s stone likeness is overwhelmed by the clutter of 47th and Broadway. And continuing that theme with exquisite subtlety is Spirit of the American Doughboy. Saint Albans, Vermont (1975), which shows the village’s WW1 memorial, park, and Victorian-buildings backdrop seemingly untouched by time but evocatively brought into the present by falling snow.

I’ll allow that Frank, Friedlander, Helen Levitt, who shows us Harlem in the ’40s, and Garry Winogrand, whose contribution here captures a New Yorkish idea of the ’60s, all do, like Brassaï and perhaps even Arbus, document some view of a larger society. And Danny Lyon, who’s represented by excerpts from his Conversations with the Dead (Texas prison life) and The Bike Riders (motorcyclists) documents cohesive subcultures. The idea applies less directly to contemporary landscapist John Pfahl, whose gorgeous, large-format color prints contrast dams, power plants, oil rigs, and other industrial-state intrusions with traditional views of nature. A dawn-silhouetted mesa dominates his Four Corners Power Plant (morning) (1982) while at the print’s left edge distant chimneys spew clouds reminiscent of the Indian smoke signals in so many cartoons.

" The Social Scene " is filled with treasures and discoveries. That the collection defies organization doesn’t really detract from the experience of viewing the show. That somebody tried to organize it anyway is a problem, but the rewards are definitely worth the aggravation.

Issue Date: August 9 - 16, 2001