Photo Opportunity

More than most artists, photographers have the option of leading double lives. Enterprising photographers can shoot both for a living and for personal expression in the course of a single day.

Take, for example, Amy Kumler. A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, with experience in the fashion photography trade, she now has a “day job” as staff photographer for Patagonia, the well-known Ventura-based clothing company. Work duties have led her to shoot the company’s products and models in exotic locales, including a recent trip to Indonesia and Thailand.

Her current exhibition at the Atget Gallery, Ventura’s brightest new art space, shows the fruits of work done in the field and later edited and reprocessed in the studio. Kumler has taken selected images, made off-duty in her travels, and treated them to the Polaroid transfer print technique, which, with its softened edges and muted colors, suggests more painterly textures than the crisp standard photographic image.

This process can transform even simple compositions, such as marketplace products in a piece called “Foods,” into a more evocative visual study. Bolstered by the softening effects of the process, the end result of Kumler’s Far Eastern travel pictures is a warm, mostly fuzzy view.

It’s an inviting, far-flung world where a man and a small elephant, in “Friends for Life,” meander down a rural road, and the humble street scene “Leaving Thailand” is a sepia-toned bit of nostalgic reflection. “Mother of Eight” is a flattering, admiring portrait of a glowing, grinning parent whom other photographers might have depicted as a burdened woman.

The charmingly quirky “Self-Portrait” is a camera’s-eye view of the artist as bikini-clad beach-lounger, peering down at her toes while lying on the sand. It’s a fitting addition, and one of the most striking images in the show, lending as it does a clear sense of the photographer’s own role in the project. She’s more than just a detached, outside observer.

Kumler’s show, a light and enjoyable affair, is fueled more by affection and love of the snapping shutter than by any probing photojournalistic instincts or self-conscious aesthetics. Overall, the exhibition presents a portrait of the artist as a professional on the road, with an eye for visual beauty in the periphery.

* Amy Kumler, “New Work,” through Dec. 24 at the Atget Gallery, 1484 E. Main St. in Ventura. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 1-6 p.m.; 652-1122.

Nature Revisited: Up in the East Wing Gallery of Ventura City Hall, just down the hall from the photographs of Ventura’s mayors and policymakers, Celeste Jaeger is showing a variety of her paintings, with a variety of artistic perspectives. In the best work here, Jaeger pushes the floral and landscape subjects into a place of exaggerated, personalized expression.

Her “Red Rock Mountain” images have a gnarled, knotty appearance, and the swarm of red, green and brown is less specific and more poetically suggestive in its depiction of place. The recognition factor is distorted enough to invite individual readings.

“Floral Design” goes in a different direction, with its flower tendrils and too-cheery colors set against a flat violet background. It defines its own sense of kitsch, like a post-pop commentary on the world of floral print fabrics.

In yet another visual mode, “Empty and Full” is an intriguingly strange diptych in which an abstract bouquet vies with a dark rectangle--a void with faint hints of color. Its study-in-contrast game plan courts tension and mystique.

*

Celeste Jaeger, through Dec. 31 at the Ventura City Hall, East Wing, 501 Poli St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: 8 a.m.-5 p.m.; 658-4760.