L.A. bodies.

To lose faith in the human body is to deny the mystic process of life and death, says French photographer Lucien Clergue. Clergue, a native of the archaelogically rich city of Arles, delights in fetishizing the human body as something more than ethnographic - it is for him preternatural, magnificent, divine. Strangely enough, the mounting of his work at the California Museum of Photography (CMP) in downtown Riverside coincided with the exhibition of corporeal imagery produced by Arthur Tress at Stephen Cohen Gallery and Victor Skrebneski at Couturier Gallery, two photographers who hardly share Clergue's Romanticism but who have also earned respect for their handling, so to speak, of the human figure.

Three guys photographing human bodies. "What's the big deal?," one might ask Everyone knows that the city of angels is a hustling, image-making, image-managing town and one more show of female nudes (Clergue), condoms and bare buttocks (Tress) or bosomy bustiers (Skrebneski) merely adds to the debauched Hollywoodesque aura expected by viewers of CNN and Baywatch. But let's not pass over the banality too quickly.

In an era when postmodern critique has ironically become the reigning analytical approach to photographic images and ideas, Clergue's metaphoric nudes seems ripe for ridicule. Who today can abstract the naked female body as an archetypal symbol of Nature and not expect to be scolded, if not for an indulgent male fantasy, then for pudgy intellectuality? The CMP seems to think Clergue is their man. What is baffling is to think that after several years of post-modernist discussion of contemporary photographic practice, the CMP now seems to be leaping "back into the future" with its fall show on Clergue's anachronistic Romantic-Modernism. Director Jonathan Green explains that in keeping with an intellectual and curatorial mission to challenge both immediate town and gown communities, the Clergue exhibition (compared to the museum's Mapplethorpe-Weston display two years ago) is clearly a deadpan rejoinder to censorial pedagogy. Playing to historiography as much as to its own sense of curatorial priority, the museum goes to great effort to put Clergue's metaphysical questions in a big iconographic light by including them in a large exhibition that covers the photographer's unfettered fascination with the archetypal sensuality of the female nude, his dedicated interest in Gypsy life, his Picassoesque obsession with death captured by the bullfight, a group of buddy shots including Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, and his recent, uneven study of John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Maybe the most stunning aspect of Clergue's photo practice is that as a disciple of the remarkable semiotician Roland Barthes, he paradoxically remained true to his nineteenth-century sensibilities, embracing photography as an intuitivist psychology of signs and a poetics of the primal and the mythic. Clergue not only rebelled against one master but bucked 1950s documentary photography and is said to have opened the door to the Franco-modernist practice of symbolic photography. Thus, with Clergue's work we are asked to reconsider a "maverick," celebratory attitude toward corporeal form and presence and read it as pre-Existentialist, pre-French nausea and now post-po-mo.

Still, beyond the issue of politically-correct censorship, I do find it hard to grasp the "now" power of Clergue's dowdy pictorialism. In a "been there, done that world," the Frenchman's idiosyncratic brand of modernity looks passe, even in his desire to pay hyperreal homage to the abstract austerity of Edward Weston's biomorphic landscapes. Unfortunately, Clergue's reverence for Weston's photographic biomorphism seems powerfully retrograde and nostalgic after decades of deconstructivist, feminist and queer photographic inquiry into the nude or naked body. To think that Clergue doubts the postmodern cynicism is to say he simply dismisses the parodied desecration of his own metaphysical inclinations and appears shamelessly uninterested in arguments that contest the mythologizing phantasms of his male-dominant gaze. Still, there are moments when his gushing nineteenth-century perspective is wholly forgivable - not for the Greek mythic inferences to muscled water that early critics seem to favor, but for his sensitivity to large-format spectacles of light. In his best visual moments like Nude Among the Stars, Point Lobos (1981), Clergue lures us with his black and white landscapes of twinkling light that dances across smooth skin of unclothed bodies - in this case, pure Playboy setups that frame the female body as the lyrical container of natural mysteries, a surface upon which the Gods plays out their earthly delights. At his imaginative worst, Clergue's voluptuous nature nudes from the '50s and '70s, sprawled out over rocks and foamy seas, remind us of nineteenth-century kitsch Germanic fantasy painting that now repeats itself in digitally affected centerfolds. Clergue seems to think that lounging women superimposed over stormy waters resonates with some preternatural mythology or deep cellular memory of our original amphibian state. Sadly, the photographic simulation reads thinner than the ontological idea. I'm not sure this work would even pass as Lesbian fiction, but I will bet money on a soft porn crowd who ogles the leggy bods.

Statistically speaking, these were not the same crowds that shuffled along the walls of West Hollywood galleries to indulge in a small yet satisfying collection of lush Skrebneski fashion shoots and photographs by the inimitable Tress. Veteran photographer Skrebneski, like Clergue, is ga-ga over the female body but here it is greased by the machine of haute couture (the show is a display of photo takes for his glossy 1995 Abbeville Press publication). His vision of the female goddess is a material girl of the post-Reagan-Bush era, a femme fatale all baubled, boosted and framed by the artist's self-conscious, opulent, geometric design.

In angrier times, it could be easy to dismiss Skrebneski's aristocratic fashion fantasy as mere nostalgia. But this is the contradictory, Republican '90s after all, and Skrebneski successfully captures the neatly cut, sequined bustiers and Berniniesque dresses that are currently in fashion, along with the sexy, butch drag of the '40s. For a photographer born in 1929 and whose eye was cured on modernist photography of the early 1950s, Skrebneski, like Clergue, sees the female body as a proper subject of benign photographic surveillance and of objectifying glorification. That the female is now elegantly wrapped and torqued to show the frivolities of French and Italian couture is really no different than seeing her magnificently, poignantly, nude. Nude, as John Berger reminds every entering undergraduate, is not naked.

By comparison, the internationally-celebrated Tress is no fool when it comes to Berger's argument and for years has played on the objectifying aspects of the human body, especially mythologizing the male nude. Tress parallels Clergue's interest in meta-material subjects but allows an ever more haunting, classic beauty to be imagined, and trumps the Frenchman's stodgy, straight bias. That's because we get to see boys, boys, boys and some men. Most of Tress's males are hunks, sporting gorgeous Tom Bianchi boy pecs or draped with hypodermic needles or sand. Either way, we are asked to enter a luminous, well-buffed world where gay life is spliced to reveal a psychological landscape magically held in remove from our ordinary eyes. In this particular exhibition, which temporarily brought together his male nude studies under one roof along with his tongue in cheek "Condom Series," Tress's queer view of the human (male) body is his signature of faith in both the uncanny and the ideal, a body that acts and is acted upon by forces beyond our control. Tress may reek playful havoc with his rainbow-colored condom spoof on suburban decoration and plastic sterilization, but at the heart of his opus, the body is full of heroic literature and the weird sublime even in its most ordinary moments.

This is not the first time the Cohen Gallery has shown Tress. But in the same month that we see Clergue in Riverside and around the corner on La Brea, Skrebneski's elegant patrician studies of the female body, Tress's male nudes and kitschy sexual innuendoes suddenly enter an aesthetic frame of local resonance and compassion fatigue: gone are the hard-porn inferences (Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman), and urine shots (Andres Serrano). Clearly, for Gen-X artists weened on Goldin, Sherman and Serrano, bodies have become concepts, not things, especially concepts that are not identified with one's "self," if you'll pardon the old-fashioned psychological term for subjective consciousness. Every Goldin layout, every Sherman and Serrano mise en scene, is further evidence that we have come to mistrust not only photographs, but our own bodies.

M. A. GREENSTEIN is a writer and contributing editor to World Art magazine, and is on the fine art faculties of The Claremont Colleges, Art Center College of Design and Otis College of Art.