A LONG WAY FROM MAIN STREET DIANE ARBUS AND HER PEERS HEADLINE AN EXHIBIT AT MOCA THAT PUTS OUTSIDERS IN THE SPOTLIGHT.

Byline: Steve Rosen Correspondent

Like American society in general, American photography went through wrenching changes in the period between President Kennedy's assassination and President Nixon's resignation.

Photographers always have had a compassionate streak for the downtrodden, as well as a taste for the sensational. But a group of Americans in the 1960s combined the two in a way that was both soulfully tender and as confrontational as a camera hurled in your face. Their overall purpose seemed to be to strip photography - especially portraiture - of the lies encased in society's middle-class suburban values and to face the naked truth.

``Street Credibility,'' the new exhibit of some 200 black-and-white photographs up now through June 7 at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Geffen Contemporary, looks at that period - as well as at some of its precedents and antecedents. The show primarily brings together work by Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Bill Owens, Larry Clark, Charles Gatewood, Danny Lyon and Jeffrey Silverthorne.

It is dominated by the images of Arbus, whose journey from fashion photography to stark, photojournalistic portraits of drag queens, dwarfs, giants and the strikingly unusual street populace of New York is one of photography's most fabled journeys. So, too, is the mysterious way it ended - she committed suicide in 1971 at age 48.

(So fabled is that journey that on Feb. 29 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open a major traveling retrospective of her work, ``Revelations.'' Because photographic prints are rarely if ever one-of-a-kind, it will feature some images also in the MOCA Geffen show. But it also will offer photographs not previously seen - some printed with her estate's permission just for the show.)

It's no coincidence that Arbus' work is from the same period when Tod Browning's 1932 movie ``Freaks'' was being rediscovered by the youth culture. That film featured real circus ``freaks'' in the cast, and at one point they chant ``One of us, one of us'' to an outsider. Arbus' work embodies that notion in a way that still shocks and fascinates us. The author Norman Mailer once said, ``Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby.''

Yet her photos make an emphatic connection between viewer and subject. An image like ``A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.,'' from 1970, is eternally haunting. This young man, standing with a cane and hunched over so his head doesn't strike the seemingly low ceiling, towers over his perplexed, elderly parents.

The curtains are closed; slipcovers are atop the furniture - as if he's some animal who could potentially cause damage. And yet the hint of a smile on his face makes him fully human and thus trapped in his body as well as in this cage of a room. It's a hallmark humanistic portrait for its angry, despairing time.

Repeatedly, Arbus' work wallops the viewer with its realness - its ``street cred,'' in the terminology of the show. One continually wonders about the health and happiness of her subjects - even the children, like the grimacing boy who is featured in her 1962 ``Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C.'' And the zombie-like, freckle-faced youth in 1967's ``Patriotic young man with a flag, N.Y.C.'' seems brainwashed - infected with patriotism, even. The photo is an anti-Norman Rockwell take on the American spirit, and quintessentially of the 1960s.

Even when the subject is more benign, as in 1967's ``Two girls in matching bathing suits, Coney Island, N.Y.,'' there's something unsettlingly outsiderish about Arbus' people. Their lives seem harsh and unsettled. And in this photo, they certainly are not helped by those garish two-pieces.

It's surprising to see an old-fashioned, traditional photo exhibition at MOCA Geffen, since the museum - a converted warehouse - has most recently been used for conceptually challenging installation art. Yet the white walls and spare, unadorned interiors, as well as the funky Little Tokyo location, serve these photos well. They bring out their edginess and scruffiness, their rejection of prettiness for its own sake. You can draw a straight line from photos like Arbus', and the impulses behind them, to the establishment of unpretentious museums like MOCA Geffen.

It's a bit harder, however, to see all the connections that artist/guest curator Mike Kelley has made in choosing the work in ``Street Credibility.'' (Many of the gelatin silver prints on display come from MOCA's own collection.) Partly that's because the smattering of photos from Arbus' predecessors - Brassai, Weegee, Walker Evans, Robert Frank - aren't enough to thoroughly provide a historical perspective.

Kelley also believes that Arbus' work, which looks candid and neutrally observational, was in fact an early form of ``constructed reality'' because of the posing involved and the effect she knew her work would have on her audience. Thus, he makes a connection between her and the fictional narratives of Theo Ehret, who photographed wrestling matches at L.A.'s Olympic Auditorium and also staged erotic female wrestling photos in his studio.

Ehret appeals to those fascinated with Hollywood's seamy side. Yet his work just isn't as interesting as that of Arbus and her contemporaries, nor as connected to a time or place. He doesn't deserve the ample space he's given in this show.

But others do. Lyon's mid-1960s portraits of mid-American bikers - back when motorcycle gangs still were considered outlaws and members were young and sullen - have an enduring impact now that motorcycle gangs are almost a part of the establishment.

Owens' photographs, from his ``Suburbia'' project, have long, elegant prose-poem titles even as the images seem to cry out against the lack of poetry in suburbia circa early 1970s. Typical is ``Our house is built with the living room in the back, so in the evenings we sit out front of the garage and watch the traffic go by.''

A family - parents in lawn chairs and their standing son - poses in front of a garage with a dark, gaping opening that threatens to swallow everyone up like Moby Dick. Ah, the vast emptiness of it all.

In the 1970s, Clark - now a movie director responsible for ``Kids'' and ``Bully'' - pushed Arbus' aesthetic further than she was probably prepared to go, with his photos of teens casually using drugs or acting sexually aware. ``Street Credibility'' has but seven of his images, but they reaffirm that his tough vision of youth without innocence hasn't mellowed.

Especially commanding in this show is the work of Silverthorne, all from the early 1970s. One doesn't quite know what to make when first meeting one of his portraits, such as 1972's ``Woman Who Died in Her Sleep.'' She looks young and healthy, a hand near her face. Yet those sutures across her naked body appear the result of a coroner's autopsy.

Is it a stunt - a performance-art ``constructed reality''? More of his remarkably creepy photos, which show the influence but not the sensationalism of the New York police photographer known as Weegee (Arthur Fellig), make clear it isn't. Silverthorne's muse is the face of death.

Friedlander and Winogrand, both masters of street-savvy, artful photography, each have many images in the show. Their work doesn't have the consistent psychological intensity of Arbus', but often they were going for amused detachment. Winogrand's ironic sense of composition can be breathtaking, as in 1960's ``John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles.''

Rather than looking at the presidential candidate head-on, he shoots from behind the podium, his camera looking dead-on as a television monitor captures Kennedy making his speech. It's a symbolic way for a photograph to enter that decade - Winogrand already is looking back at his subject. Nowadays, in exhibits like this and in so many other ways, we all look back on that time incessantly.

STREET CREDIBILITY

What: 200 photographs by Diane Arbus and her peers documenting American street life from the late 1940s to the 1970s.

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Los Angeles.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; through June 7.

Tickets: $8 adults, $5 students and seniors. Thursdays are free. Call [phone] for information.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1) ``Two girls in matching bathing suits, Coney Island, N.Y.,'' 1967, by Diane Arbus.

(2)

``Unknown Wrestlers,'' 1970, by Theo Ehret.