GENIUS, EXPOSED GETTY'S LANDMARK PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION SHOWCASES THE BEST OF THE BEST.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

Los Angeles has a new cultural institution - the Photography Hall of Fame.

Technically, that's not true. But the new ``Photographers of Genius at the Getty'' show, at the Getty Center through July 25, has such an air of permanence and importance, such a concern for quality and propriety in its choices for inclusion, that it could be its own museum. It's a succinct college course in the history of photography.

You wouldn't expect less of the Getty, especially concerning photography. The show celebrates the 20th anniversary of the museum's decision to collect photographs. It did so, in typical Getty fashion, in a big way. It purchased 25,000 prints from more than a dozen international collections and then hired Weston Naef from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to be the curator.

At opening ceremonies for this show, Naef recalled his arrival here in July 1984. ``It was crystal clear, the sun rising over the San Bernardino Mountains in the most brilliant way, and I sat on the tarmac with my dog and 50 crates of the most beautiful photographs ever assembled. That's how I came to Los Angeles.''

The Getty's world-renowned photo collection has since grown to 75,000 prints. And for this show, a so-called Premiere Presentation in the Getty's large Exhibitions Pavilion, Naef was determined to select the best of the best.

With a few exceptions, the exhibit only features three photos each by 30 international photographers whose work stretches from the medium's beginning in the 1840s to the end of the 1960s. Naef did not select more- recent photographers because it's too soon to know their legacy. ``There's only one test - the test of time,'' he said. ``How do things last?''

There were three considerations in his choices, he said. Each photographer must be collected in depth by the Getty, each must be considered ahead of his or her time, and each must have had a measurable influence on his contemporaries and future generations.

Not all are famous names: Two, Thomas Eakins and Charles Sheeler, probably are better-known as American painters. And only Henri Cartier- Bresson is still alive. But this exhibit takes pains to introduce the viewer to the unfamiliar photographers. Gallery walls are respectful tones of gray and red; wall text is written with clarity and often is as prominent as the black-and-white photographs.

Overall, the show flows like a time line. It has been divided into different periods in photography's development as an art form - ``Discovery and Invention,'' ``Document Into Art,'' ``Modernism: The First Generation'' and so forth.

Within the sections, each of the chosen photographers gets a written introduction explaining his or her historical importance and artistic approach. And then the selected prints - all in best possible condition - are displayed adjacently.

As a result, this approach establishes that who is on display is as important as what. And it reaffirms the importance of the Getty, itself, as the institution that decides who merits inclusion. Perhaps that's elitist, but it's also authoritative - and reminds us of the role of the museum to be definitive. The show's greatest strength is in providing a remarkably thorough visual history of the medium with little if any wasted space.

It's not an understatement to call some of the prints on display downright precious. Pieces of cloth cover the rare, blue cyanotypes used by England's Anna Atkins in the 1840s to create photograms of algae. Rather than having a camera, she placed the actual objects on light-sensitive paper to create her negatives. One can sense her delight and surprise at discovering this new medium capable of ``painting'' a beautiful image out of algae, of all things.

Another photographer in the show, Hungary's Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, did the same thing some 80 years later, but for a different purpose. Like the abstract painters of his time, particularly Kandinsky, he used objects with familiar shapes and forms to create strange, new visual experiences. His three photograms have a cosmic strangeness, as if he has captured the crackle of lightning.

When the photographers are famous, this show is interesting for what it selects from their work. For instance, Diane Arbus - who closes the exhibit - is not represented by any of her more sensationalistic photos of societal outsiders and misfits. Those are left for two current Arbus shows, at L.A. County Museum of Art and MOCA at the Geffen.

Instead, curator Naef chose Arbus' portrait of identical twin girls, her quietly humorous study of a carnival-attraction ``headless woman'' and the extraordinary 1966 ``Woman in a Rose Hat.'' This latter photograph, a tightly framed and melancholy close-up of an elderly woman, slowly reveals how her wayward gaze speaks volumes for what she has seen and will not see again.

Where possible, Naef also provides new information. For Walker Evans, there are three photographs from his (and writer James Agee's) ``Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'' portfolio of weary but persevering Depression-era Southerners that helped define our views of American poverty.

These are familiar. But Naef has also included several examples from Evans' far lesser-known series of ``Subway Portraits,'' in which the photographer strapped a hidden camera to his chest and took secret photos of New York straphangers. Although shot from 1938-41, Evans didn't make prints until 1968, shortly before his death. While too small and dark to have the impact of his Southern work, they do show Evans' keen and influential interest in observing people in their milieu.

But he was not the first. This exhibit also offers American Lewis Hine's eternally heart-rending, early-20th-century photos of child laborers. A muckraker, Hine was an important influence on the demand for child-labor laws.

The show has much that is simply beautiful, both for what it observes and for the instinctual eye and compositional skill of the photographer in making us realize beauty. For the latter, the French photographer Eugene Atget's 1925 ``Storefront'' is an eternally appealing example - a shop window displaying mannequins with umbrellas also reflects trees.

Even more memorable is Czech photographer Josef Sudek's 1959 ``Late Roses,'' in which a rainy, darkly framed window makes the glass vase of roses seem a tentative respite against the weather's chill.

The exhibit points out that photography has frequently been a heroic undertaking, given the risks and hardships involved. The inventiveness of those working in the 1800s, when glass-plate negatives had to be carried to the scene of the photograph-making, seems miraculous today.

The American Carleton Watkins, whose photos of the majesty of this country's landscape made him one of the first major nature photographers, used a mule pack to carry his 2,000 pounds of baggage, including glass plates, for his work for the California State Geological Survey. In a work like ``First View of the Valley,'' one wonders how Watkins could have the confidence of his ability to mechanically capture on camera such an expanse.

He was rewarded for his hard work, however. President Lincoln decreed Yosemite a protected site because of Watkins' 1862 photographs. As this exhibit repeatedly shows, good photography can have that kind of enduring effect.

PHOTOGRAPHERS OF GENIUS

Where: The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive.

When: Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Through July 25.

Tickets: Admission is free; parking is $5. Reservations required for groups of 15 or more. Call [phone] for information; [phone] for hearing-impaired. Or visit www.getty.edu.

The photographers

Here are the names of those included in ``Photographers of Genius at the Getty.''

Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Eugene Atget, Anna Atkins, Hippolyte Bayard, Henry P. Bosse, Brassai, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Thomas Eakins, Walker Evans, Roger Fenton, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey.

Hill & Adamson, Lewis Hine, Gertrude Kasebier, Andre Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, the Langenheim brothers, Gustave Le Gray, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Eadweard J. Muybridge, Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournachon), Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Albert Renger-Patzsch.

Alexander Rodchenko, August Sander, Charles Sheeler, Camille Silvy, Frederick Sommer, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, Dori Ulmann, Carleton Watkins, Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Edward Weston.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos, box

Photo:

(1) Lewis Hine used his camera to document the hardships of child laborers, such as in this 1910 photo of Sadie Pfeiffer, a spinner in a North Carolina cotton mill. Hine's work helped to change child labor laws.

(2) Man Ray made collaboration with his models, as in 1924's ``Le Violon d'Ingres,'' essential to his art.

Box:

The photographers (see text)