Proof that the system has faults

The long and impressive history of socially concerned documentary photography gets an unexpected -- and impressive -- workout in a solo Los Angeles debut by young New York artist Taryn Simon. Photography historian Beaumont Newhall long ago set the documentary standard when he wrote: “The quality of authenticity implicit in a photograph may give it special value as evidence, or proof.” A Post-modern perspective casts doubt on authenticity, but Simon engages exactly that sense of disbelief in a powerful and productive way.

At Gagosian Gallery, Simon shows 17 large-format color portraits of men and, occasionally, women. The settings are mundane, the poses static. Each full-length portrait is straightforward and unembellished.

Larry Youngblood and his girlfriend stand before a cinder-block wall in Tucson’s blazing midday heat. Frederick Daye sits in the cool darkness of a bar inside a San Diego American Legion post. Ronald Jones hunches on the edge of a shopping cart in front of a grocery store. Roy Criner poses in a Houston lumberyard near massive piles of felled trees.

Titled “The Innocents,” the photographs document men who served time in prison for violent crimes they did not commit. Ten years of a 99-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault; 8 years of a 10 1/2 -year sentence for kidnapping and child molestation; 13 years of a life sentence for capital murder -- the litany of false convictions is sobering. Indeed, “false conviction” might be an effective subtitle for this body of photographs, which questions our easy belief in the medium’s value as evidence or proof. Simon’s pictures offer their own gruesome documentation of wrecked lives.

The absence of obvious artfulness in these photographs adds to their strength. Stylistically there is nothing unusual about any of them -- a visual fact that only serves to bring the documented miscarriages of justice into our daily orbit. Their routine look makes them even more chilling.

Still, knowing the horrible fate suffered by each portrait subject changes the way you look at the photographs. Jones, for instance, sits beneath an advertisement for a state lottery, which looms as a wry commentary on his erroneous death sentence. Criner -- a big, burly man -- suddenly seems not unlike those massive trees lying around him, cut and stripped of their bark. Backed up against a cinder block wall, Youngblood and his girlfriend are encased in another kind of prison.

These interpretations, of course, are not intrinsic to the images. They are projected onto the photographs after knowing something about their subjects’ stories. The lumberyard was the actual scene of Criner’s alibi, not a commentary on his situation by the artist. Youngblood and friend could be anywhere. Was the lottery sign even there the day Jones was arrested?

Simon’s work demonstrates how “the quality of authenticity implicit in a photograph” is pliable. It can make our dubious projections seem truthful and convincing.

False convictions are a result of misidentification and, as a gallery handout attests, photographs are woven throughout the complex system of mug shots, composite sketches, crime scene documentation, verbal testimony and the other evidence that makes a case. In these quiet photographs absolutes blur into shades of gray. Because of it, “The Innocents” is as devastating a group of documentary photographs as you’ll find attesting to the immorality of capital punishment.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Sept. 3. Closed Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

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Photography and paint’s tense dance

Today, it’s almost impossible to recall how color photography was once regarded with suspicion -- not merely by the art public, but among photographers as well. As recently as the 1970s William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore and other pioneers had to contend with color’s established associations with commercial rather than creative concerns. Black and white signaled art photography, sober and committed to darkroom rigor; color signaled advertising and the rotogravure, not to mention the alien realm of painting.

Grant Mudford played with this peculiar cultural conditioning in a marvelous 1982 series of photographs that has now been reformatted for an impressive show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Printed at the scale of paintings -- about 4 feet high and 5 feet wide -- their subjects are the tubs in which industrial paints are commercially mixed. Shown empty, the tubs are smeared and splattered in rainbow hues. They suggest vernacular action paintings, or “found abstractions.”

One peculiar feature of the imagery is that it’s difficult to gauge the buckets’ actual size. Each of eight photographs isolates a single tub against an asphalt background, like an iconic saint. Without a combination of memory and close scrutiny of the minutiae of pavement debris, the tubs’ physical dimensions are elusive.

The tubs are empty, flexible containers for unnameable colors -- which is a resonant metaphor for Mudford’s own photographs. (Two other pictures instead show wooden pallets encrusted with paint, but the coy pun on “palette” is distracting.) The group is titled “Shiva Paint Tubs,” after the Hindu god of transformation for whom creation emerges from destruction. The tensions between painting and photography are wittily evoked.

Lord Shiva’s dance teaches that the energy of art is finally what sustains us. Mudford’s colorful works take the age-old waltz between painting and photography for a provocative turn around the floor. Dating to the moment 20 years ago when painting was poised for a major return to prominence and photography was finding parity with its ancient cousin, they’re incisive images.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Aug. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The result of aimless drifting

In a famously insistent drawing and lithograph Bruce Nauman once demanded of viewers, “Please Pay Attention Please” -- a request whose pleading circular grammar suggests eternal need. Charles LaBelle has taken a similar tack in his work, although its tone is typically more pacific.

Five sprawling new pieces at Roberts & Tilton Gallery continue the theme, by joining together thousands of tiny snapshots taken while wandering through unfamiliar cities. London; Marseille, France; and Bellagio, Italy, are recorded in huge grids of photographs, titled “Driftworks,” made as the artist wandered aimlessly. The photographs are an inventory of random encounters.

The little inch-square pictures show ordinary things -- flowers, lamps, signs, stairways, shadows, graffiti, palm trees, billboards, chairs, clouds and much more (everything, it seems, except other people). Assembled into murals as much as 29 feet long, the pictures appear to be grouped by subject, color or viewpoint -- looking down at the pavement, across the street, through interior hallways and so on.

For a viewer, scanning these accumulations is like eavesdropping on someone else’s visual thoughts. “Catch my drift,” these photo-grids seem to say. A fourth “Driftwork,” shot in Venice, Italy, overlays a greater degree of order, creating a square maze of red-hued pictures for a city famously adored as a wonderful (and easy) place to be lost.

Being found by being lost is also the theme of “Exterior Song -- Hollywood (Cracked Actor),” a work in which a song lyric or poem about broken dreams and hardened experience is painted on mattresses LaBelle found around town. Each of 37 mattresses is photographed at the Hollywood curbside or alley in which it was randomly found, while an accompanying map charts his accidental itinerary. Like “Driftworks,” the mattresses and their inescapable reference to sleep imply that poignant, soulful insights are to be found in dropping established patterns of consciousness.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 549-0223, through Saturday.

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Out of class and into the gallery

“Fresh Air” introduces three young California artists whose very different photographs are nonetheless loosely linked. Suggestions of individual anxiety appear amid unidentified environmental distress. Recent art school graduates, the three are having their Los Angeles debuts at Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, which relocated from Oakland in the spring.

L.A. artist Juliana Paciulli makes lush, richly detailed, large-format oval photographs that each appear to be a scene isolated from a larger, enigmatic narrative. Focused on young women, the stories seem just slightly out of whack -- witness an ordinary girl in a typical suburban bathtub, yet unexpectedly wearing a swimsuit; or another who chews idly on the needles of an artificial Christmas tree.

San Francisco’s Tim Sullivan photographs himself dressed like a Mod geek. The weird pattern in his suit is identical to the surrounding kitchen wallpaper. Like a stunned Cheshire cat, he seems poised to disappear into the surroundings, save for the oversize black eyeglasses that replace the feline’s trademark grin.

Most provocatively, Oakland’s Julia Page mixes paranoia and a survivalist impulse in photo-grids showing two figures dressed in white jumpsuits, going about the business of digging underground shelters -- one at a sandy beach, another in the desert and a third in a snowy wood. Soon the post-nuclear Adam and Eve disappear into the protective earth. The source of their dread is never revealed, while their mode of endurance is indistinguishable from burial.

A five-channel video animation nearby, also by Page, placidly diagrams methods for converting a cabin, a van, a garage, a courtyard bungalow and a basement into a secure environment. The “fresh air” of the show’s title grows insistently corrosive, distilling today’s pervasive social mood.

Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 837-1073, through Aug. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.