GETTY CELEBRATES A PHOTO PIONEER.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

Paul Strand's reputation as one of the first great 20th-century American photographers rests largely on the painterly, avant-garde qualities of his work.

Yet, strangely, what stands out most strongly in ``Three Roads Taken: The Photographs of Paul Strand'' at the Getty Center is his more traditional work - portraits, some of them posed, in which the subjects' humanity is at least as compelling as the photographer's technique. All of the more than 70 black-and-white photos in this show come from the Getty's own collection.

Born in New York in 1890, Strand received his first camera at age 12 as a gift from his father. As a young man, he was influenced by European cubism and abstraction after seeing the works of such painters as Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso and George Braque at the famous 1913 New York Armory Show.

That fueled a desire in him to photograph geometric forms - and people on the street - in new and daring ways. He also developed a friendship and close working relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a great champion of modernism. Strand received choice play in Stieglitz's influential photo journal, ``Camera Work,'' establishing a reputation that constantly grew and lasted until Strand's death in 1976.

In one of the show's early works, 1915's ``City Hall Park, New York'' he turned a New York crowd scene into a ``Blow-Up''-like mystery piece. He cropped his negative to create a vertical perspective, an unusual and even unworldly way to capture a crowd walking on the flat earth of a teeming metropolis. And in a forerunner of digital manipulation, he also removed one of the pedestrians from the negative, leaving an unattached shadow in the image. The effect is spooky.

In 1916, while spending time in Twin Lakes, Conn., Strand tried some of his most radical experiments with abstraction. In ``Twin Lakes,'' he rotated the picture plane 180 degrees in order to capture the sky at the bottom of an image and a porch at the top. Trying to figure it out in a gallery is a dizzying experience - like doing a complete loop on a roller coaster.

The show's title comes from Strand's statement about searching for a place for his work in a post-Armory Show world: ``My work grew out of a response, first, to trying to understand the new developments in painting; second, a desire to express certain feelings I had about New York, where I lived; third, I wanted to see if I could photograph people without their being aware of the camera.''

To him, those were three roads worth taking.

Strand's most famous photo was a result of that last ``road.'' Shot in 1916, it is of a blind woman on a New York street - she has a bold sign declaring her blindness. One eye is wide open; the other is almost shut. Strand's photo is a tight, intimate shot and all of the hardship and desperation of her life comes through. The effect is despairing.

This photo shows the influence of Strand's first teacher, the tough-minded realist/social reformer/photojournalist Lewis Hine, rather than any art-minded modernist. It's ironic that it is so crucial to his legacy today. Another irony of this shot is that it didn't matter that Strand was so careful, at this stage of his career, about not letting his subject know he was shooting. This woman wouldn't be able to tell anyway.

But in 1916's ``Woman, New York,'' he used a hidden side lens attached to his camera to capture a disheveled, elderly and glum woman. She apparently never noticed a thing. One gets a feel for how difficult urban survival could be back then, and how full the streets were of the impoverished and lonely.

Once his reputation became more established, Strand found himself more on the move - New England, the Southwest, Mexico. One gallery of the Getty is dedicated to landscapes and portraits, and it is consistently interesting if only rarely outstanding.

His 1931 ``Rancho de Taos Church'' is especially beautiful from this period because he used light and shadow to portray the unassuming adobe structure as a minimalist cross. (His friend Georgia O'Keeffe also painted this church in Taos, N.M.)

Uncomfortable with the post-World War II conservatism that eventually would turn into McCarthyism, Strand began a project to celebrate America as a land of natural beauty that rose above its politics. That resulted in his 1950 book, ``Time in New England,'' from which a shimmering print called ``Apple Tree - Full Bloom'' is featured here. In just a few years, Beatnik-era photographer Robert Frank - in his landmark ``The Americans'' - would see the same country as an alienated landscape. Times and trends were changing fast.

Strand moved to France in 1950, staying in Europe afterward, and began working on book projects with various collaborators.

They featured posed but naturalistic portraits of workers and everyday folk in France, Spain and Scotland. While these would seem to go against the grain of his ``three roads'' declaration of some 35 years previous, they nevertheless collectively constitute this show's most memorable work. Humanity trumps theory every time.

His 1950 ``M. Pelletier, Gondeville, Charente'' is a portrait of an older man whose life possibly might have been as hard as that of the elderly women seen in New York in 1916. One lens of his glasses is broken and fallen, and his shirt is stained from labor. Yet, with his trim beard and curious stare, he looks stoic and wise as a philosopher. While Strand certainly doesn't romanticize him, he gave him his dignity.

So, too, did Strand do that with the young woman included in a 1953 portfolio of life in an impoverished Italian town, ``Tailor's Apprentice, Luzzara.'' Her short dark hair and eyes match her crisp (and stylish by today's standards) coat; she holds a hat with a gigantic brim. Her presence is gentle but formidable. She seems ageless, but her beauty is timeless.

And because Strand could capture that quality so well, with warmth and without sentimentality, his best photographs also are timeless.

THREE ROADS TAKEN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAUL STRAND

Where: The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles.

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday; through Sept. 4.

Tickets: Admission is free; parking is $7. Call [phone] or visit getty.edu for more information.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

``City Hall Park, New York'' (1915), by Paul Strand.