ART REVIEW : PHOTOGRAPHER’S FOCUS IS ON NUDITY

Men look at women in lots of different ways. But when the man is a photographer and the woman is nude, the looking becomes especially intense, and the woman becomes particularly vulnerable. Viewed as temptress, ice queen, freckled next-door goddess or earth mother, women who pose in the altogether yield up parts of their real personalities to whatever fanciful notion the photographer has in mind.

Ronald Wohlauer’s black-and-white photographs--on exhibit through Oct. 17 at Susan Spiritus Gallery, 522 Old Newport Blvd. in Newport Beach--present a range of approaches to the nude, some more successful than others.

The Colorado-based artist’s subjects are mostly lithe outdoor women, their bikini lines like transparent costumes. Posed in front of majestic, hilly landscapes or lolling in grassy meadows, these women sometimes look pointlessly ungainly (one stands awkwardly with both hands on one hip and a quizzical expression).

Other subjects (like the woman lying on her stomach on a tree-lined path, a few feet from a long pipe) lose their individuality to become objects in a contrivedly “artsy” set-up. When Wohlauer seems to try for an Edward Weston approach (the nude on a sand dune) or a quasi-Ruth Bernhard (the nude curled up in a box), the results are merely dead-and-dutiful homages to much-copied masters.

But some of the outdoor photographs show women who look as though they’re simply enjoying the freedom of being unclothed on a pleasant day, unaware of the intrusive eye of the camera. One shot, of a woman standing with her hands on her head, half-hidden by tall grasses, has the rangy feel of one of Annie Brigman’s free-spirited nudes (though Wohlauer’s technical abilities have nothing in common with the devil-may-care sloppiness of the 19th-Century California photographer).

Still other images flirt with the notion of naked and nude by showing women partly clothed, either in heavily stage-managed poses (the demure, glasses-wearing type standing with bowed head and a dress falling off one shoulder) or with the unforced naturalness of the plumpish woman who looks directly at the camera, comfortably aware that her breasts are revealed by a slipping slip.

The gallery is also showing three-dimensional photographic “environments” by Sharon Boysel that revitalize the old-fashioned diorama. Boysel builds small, three-walled stage sets with hand-colored photographs of architectural ruins at Pompeii. Lit from above and filled with found and handmade objects that both extend and complement the crumbling environment, these little worlds conjure up the life of the ancient city in AD 79, just before Mount Vesuvius erupted and caused the city’s destruction.

Although some of these little views are insufferably cute, with miniature cameras on tripods recording the scene or an oversupply of itty-bitty little objects, most offer a novel, surprisingly woman-centered point of view.

In one environment, a gold skirt half hidden by a broken column (carefully copied from the real columns in the wraparound photo) and two tiny pairs of women’s shoes rooted in midstep suggest an ancient game of hide-and-seek halted just as someone tagged the hider.

Several other environments fill out the photographed remains of temple sites with imaginative reconstructions of charred wood fires and bristle-encrusted, glowing animals that escaped one form of immolation only to fall prey to another.

A lint-covered wedding cake on a pedestal, a bunch of grapes and a pair of tiny gold goblets on a table, a miniature suitcase full of metal bits--such objects may not really have been preserved as mysterious remnants by the suddenness of the disaster.

But the San Jose-based photographer conjures up an engaging fantasy of the sweet life in a southern Italian town. The ruins in the photographs, which she usually colors pink and green (with green or violet skies) supply just the right combination of historical rootedness and late-20th-Century romanticizing on perhaps the most fascinating disaster in the history of the world.