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A bravo to PMA for Bravo show

— I start my first column of the new year with a reminder to see the Lola Alvarez Bravo exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art. Bravo (1903-1993) is interesting historically -- Mexico's first female photographer, wife of that country's master photographer: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, pioneer modernist -- but this event presents her for her accomplishments as an artist.

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The presentation is embodied in 55 vintage black and white photographs. They were accomplished during the 1930s, the '40s and '50s years in which her fine-arts career, as distinguished from her work as a commercial photographer, flourished.

The location of her images is always Mexico, and the subjects range from landscapes, through genre to portraiture. The landscapes and the towns are imbued with a sense of affiliation, even passion. They escape the sentimental, but do not strike wholly modernist notes -- at least as I understand the term. They are not as objective as modernism anticipates.

It is in Bravo's portraits that the outlook of the times best expresses itself. Here she was able to detach herself from her subjects. She is not self-conscious and neither are the people who sat for her. Given the fact that post-revolutionary Mexico was in the throes of a patriotic and cultural renaissance during much of her career, it is remarkable that any amount of detachment could be achieved. It is that detachment, that objectiveness that allows Bravo's work to live beyond the moment, to embrace common experience. Her fascination and engagement with her people extends beyond the specifics of her land and enters into the realm of universals.

These are wonderful photographs and the best among them are timeless.

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE ABSTRACT

Photography, like a good-natured protozoan, has subdivided itself a time or two. Currently, we have images created from scratch by digital devices, images created from film and traditional photochemical processes and images that are a blend of both. We are near the moment, however, at which traditional film photography will be thought of as a specialty. Perhaps we've already reached it.

In any event, the visual depth and physical intensity offered by traditional photographs are incomparable qualities and as if to emphasize the point, some photographers venture into old technologies that once nurtured the art. Hence the reappearance of the pinhole camera, the toy cameras of a half-century ago and arcane printing technologies such as are used in ambrotypes. Each has a richness and, often, a dash of unplanned wonder that make them enormously appealing. Traditional photography lacks certainty, but it is ever fresh. It would be an irony to discover that digital photography is being used to simulate the early history of film photography.

In this regard, I recommend ''Re-View, Abstract Photography by Maine Artists'' at the Daniel Kany Gallery. Sidestepping the old issue of whether photography, as a mirror of the natural, can be abstract, among the dozen photographers in this show some appear to use pinholes or at least suggest them in their work.

Michael Heiko's prints ''Horse,'' ''Clam Digger'' and ''House'' have that ephemeral quality that inhabits pinhole work. The images are there, but in barely tangible form. Their lack of substantiality, their dreaminess is their poetry.

''Stonehenge'' and ''Crop Cycle Discovery'' by Ramona du Houx have similar virtues. However made, their intentions and those of photographers who use hand-held simple cameras are in common.

Ruth Sylmor's black and white photographs, particularly ''Entangled Trees'' and ''Bruises of Memory,'' have a dark poetry about them that is disturbing. Perhaps I should say menacing. Skeletal branches, like thin fingers, reach out against the sky with not fully-disclosed intentions. They could turn on the viewer. Work with a grip such as this is not common.

I also mention the color prints of Grace Hopkins-Lisle. They fit the definition of geometric abstraction more exactly than any other images in the show. The artist finds the visual moments in which architectural line, shadow and color merge to create images that are aloof, elegant and intellectually provocative. They detach themselves from the real, if that can be said of photography.

SCALING KATAHDIN

Although art for art's sake is the usual museum fare, Bates is demonstrating how a college museum can be used as an agency for encouraging social ends. Its effort this year is the exploration of issues dealing with the environment.

That this need not exclude work that is purposely aesthetic is demonstrated by two current exhibitions, ''Taking Different Trails: The Artists' Journey To Katahdin Lake'' and ''Wildness Within, Wildness Without: Exploring Maine's Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail.'' The former is an exhibition primarily of paintings; the latter is a show of large color photographs by Bridget Besaw.

''Taking Different Trails,'' as the full title implies, leads to Katahdin Lake and, inevitably, the great mountain itself. One aesthetic trail was taken by Marsden Hartley in October of 1939. A difficult, but ultimately energizing expedition, the event is memorialized in this show by two sparse, forceful charcoals that set a tone for the mountain. They are followed by a small watercolor by the master, James Fitzgerald, acknowledging its iconic status and contributing to the emotional intensity of that status.

With these as its prologue, the show offers 20 contemporary artists as they approach the theme. Their intentions or the circumstances direct them in various ways and that is part of the fascination of the event. For example, Abbott Meader's gorgeous and wildly colored collage ''October, Katahdin Lake'' contrasts with the severity of Michael Vermette's watercolor ''Katahdin in February.'' The upward lift of that great mass in Vermette's work imposes itself on the viewer; it is a presence, not benign and not avoidable.

Besaw's images share Vermette's sense of immediacy. The viewer is a participant on the Knife Edge and variously on the ice, in the fog and in the snow. Collectively, her work is an exposition of a place, so fresh and clear that you can smell it with your eyes. These are at once documents and animated works of art. It is a pleasure to see them.

Philip Isaacson of Lewiston has been writing about the arts for the Maine Sunday Telegram for 40 years. He can be contacted at:

pmisaacson@isaacsonraymond.com