An American dilemma: 'Points of Entry: Reframing America.' (various artists, various galleries, Tucson, Arizona; San Francisco and San Diego, California)

"Refraining America" offers a distilled representation of some of the best documentary photography produced by immigrants during the tense years of the 1930s and 1940s. Viewed from the perspective of the 1990s, Center of Creative Photography director Terence Pitt's choice of work by Alexander Alland, Robert Frank, John Gutmann, Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth, Lisette Model and Marion Palfi helps to restore the reputation of the documentary genre.

The bad rap on documentary often centers on the internally conflicting goals of educating "the public" about a specific social condition and creating empathy for the subject affected by the particular social circumstances. A heightened focus on the subject all too often personalizes and universalizes social inequalities, thwarting views of the specific economic, cultural, political and other structures responsible for subjugation. Documentary photography thus runs the risk of neutralizing its capacity to alert an audience to the conditions it represents. The risk is greater when the photographer's practice is directed and funded by an institution and when that agency has an explicit mandate - be it a repressive or a liberal one.

Unlike many other well-known documentary photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, the photographers included in "Reframing America" did not work for a U.S. government agency, such as the photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration, and thus cannot be charged with developing a highly-edited body of imagery that could be used to help restore the nation's damaged psyche during the years of the economic depression and into World War II. Working independently, each photographer was inclined to view their new country through the perspective of their own position as immigrants, critically sharpened by their experiences of persecution in Europe. Alland fled civil war in Russia and came to New York City after a brief exile in Istanbul. Gutmann left Germany in 1933. Mieth left Germany at the age of 15 with Hagel to wander throughout Eastern Europe and Turkey. Concerned about the rise of fascism, Hagel emigrated to the U.S. in 1928; Mieth arrived in 1930. Model, born Lisette Stern, moved from Vienna with her Jewish, Austro-Czech father and Italian mother to France in 1933. Her brother was deported to Vichy, France and died in a concentration camp. She emigrated to New York City in 1938. Born in Berlin of Hungarian and German parents, Palfi left Germany for Amsterdam in 1936. Fleeing the German army four years later, she settled in New York City. Frank did not arrive in the U.S. until after the war: his German-Jewish father emigrated to Switzerland and Frank, born in Zurich, fared the war years better than many. It is important to note, as the catalog fails to, that U.S. immigration policy during the 1930s and early 1940s was not very open: explicit quotas, implicit racism, a strict foreign service policy and the expense of obtaining visas and transportation from Europe, among other factors, conspired to make emigration impossible for millions.

Of the photographs in "Refraining America," Alland's photographs imply that he embraced his adopted country the least critically. Many of his photographs celebrate the promise of opportunity often underscored by the mandate of assimilation for new immigrants. His Photomontage (c. 1943), presents cut-outs of school children of diverse ethnicities circled around a white female teacher whose profile is echoed by that of a white male student. The entire group is shown against the background of a school poster that reads "America - A Nation of One People From Many Countries." Nonetheless, Alland, like the other photographers in the exhibition, could not ignore the racism endured by centuries by African Americans since their forced arrival. This is most evident in the photograph University of Chicago Students Prepare Placards for a Demonstration against Racial Discrimination in the Medical School (c. 1946). Despite Alland's explicit comment on racism, the cruelty of institutional policies is blunted by his theatrical lighting and compositions. Considering the subject matter, Alland's stance runs the risk of rendering social realities as anecdotal, and therefore neutralizing the potential strength of the message.

Palfi's remarkable photographs could not be further from documentary's "double risk": her representations of African Americans focus on the individual without ignoring or shying away from the implications and effects of racism. In Wife of a Lynch Victim, Irwinton, Georgia, from her 1949 book There is No More Time, Palfi delves into the challenges of documentary by representing human suffering in a way that shows both the subject's grief and strength.

Because of efforts by curators from the Center for Creative Photography, which houses Palfi's archive and has made access to and publication of her work possible, Palfi is just now receiving recognition. She appears to have addressed the racial intolerance she faced as an immigrant through "Great American Artists of Minority Groups" (1944-45), a photographic project celebrating minority artists in the U.S. This work was followed by numerous other large-scale projects, such as the book Suffer Little Children (1949) about poverty faced by children; two series, "Georgia Study" (1949) and "There Is No More Time" (1949), on racial discrimination in the South; and the series "In These Ten Cities" (1950-51) on housing discrimination.

In contrast, Frank's The Americans (1959) has become one of the best-known photographic indictments of the country's racial and political policies. Like Palfi, Frank often focused on the tensions within anti-monumental events and moments, such as worried-looking waitresses behind crowded lunch counters, the lonely spaces of men's rest-rooms and bleak scenes of Detroit auto workers on assembly lines. Frank's mostly closeup and grainy pictures engendered a dramatically new approach to documentary photography - one viewed as "artistic," while the subject matter itself was initially debated within U.S. art and photography institutions as too critical of a fundamentally good and noble country. Nor did it go without notice that these bitter and sometimes loving portraits of the lesser-seen faces of America were taken by an immigrant. In addition, the early interpretive framing and dissemination of The Americans also helped bolster the notion of travel as a male activity; its first U.S. publication in 1959 was coupled with Kerouac's rambling elegiacorgiastic prose. However, Frank's tender photograph of his wife Mary and their two children inside their automobile, included in this exhibition, cuts across the myth of the solo, macho photographer on the road.

Like Frank, Model was particularly sensitive to the disparity between wealth and poverty in the U.S., though she played out this hierarchy through the representations of women in New York City. Much of her work is based on the simplified symbology of contrast: reflections of female mannequins in storefront windows and working women photographed from dramatic diagonal angles. Her more direct portraits work more effectively, such as World War II Rally, Lower East Side (c. 1943), to show how women at the time confronted the harsh realities of economic survival.

Compared to Model's often over-dramatized photographs, Hagel's portrait Woman at Her Augusta, Georgia Home (1939), emphasizes a woman's majestic expression rather than the barrenness of her domestic environment. This African American woman's contained and assured projection of self defies the common belief that documentary photography overwhelmingly victimizes its subjects. Working separately and together, Hagel and Mieth employed the camera in support of unionizing efforts and other labor causes, as well as in documenting the incongruity of American democracy in Japanese relocation camps and meetings of pro-Nazi German-American societies.

The selection of prints by Gutmann also focuses on African Americans and life in the cities, especially in San Francisco. Much of Gutmann's work conveys a respectful relationship with the people he photographed, as in the exquisite, hopeful portrait of an African American man, WPA, San Francisco (1937). Seen in the context of work by his documentary colleagues in the exhibition, Gutmann's work blends sublime composition with a distanced and tempered sense of American culture and politics.

The most powerful work in "Refraining America" demonstrates that the documentary photograph can elucidate instances of injustice, racism and inequality, as well as convey respect and dignity, without further oppressing its subjects. Given the renewed interest in documentary, the exhibition calls attention to provocative possibilities for working in and rethinking some of documentary photography's challenges.

ANDREA LISS, a Los Angeles historian and critic of contemporary art, teaches at the University of Southern California.