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Photography review

At the Griffin Museum, three shows and an array of photography talent

An image from David Poorvu’s “Hiding in Plain Sight.”David Poorvu

WINCHESTER — “Photography Atelier 30” has work by 23 photographers. They’re participants in the atelier, a course run by the Griffin Museum of Photography for intermediate and advanced photographers. On the basis of the works on display, advanced seems the order of the day. The exhibition runs through Sept. 28. Note that a much more extensive version is online at photographyatelier.org .

The most obvious pleasure the show has to offer is getting to look at excellent images. The three photographs from Sue D’Arcy Fuller’s series “The Journey Is the Destination” present maps encased in ice cubes. That sounds bizarre. It is bizarre. But the photographs are visually marvelous, and that’s what counts. Location, location, location? On the rocks, on the rocks, on the rocks.

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If there were any maps in Connie Lowell’s three “Youth in Cars” photographs, they’d come courtesy of AAA. They show a young couple as seen through an automobile’s windshield or lying on the hood. The simplicity of the set-up — the familiarity, too — make the images very appealing. Lowell’s pictures, which are in black and white, have a new-car sheen (which is like a new-car smell, only for the eyes rather than the nose). Susan Green’s photographic quintet from “The Light You Left Behind” are in color and much more about texture. In one, a close-up view of an armchair, the pebbling of the covering has an almost dimensional tactility. It’s the furniture equivalent of new-car feel. Somewhere an approving Ricardo Montalban intones the words “rich Corinthian leather.”

A related pleasure has to do with the juxtapositions of bodies of work. Curation without imagination inspires indignation. There’s nothing to be indignant about here. Paula Tognarelli, the Griffin’s director, served as curator, with the assistance of Meg Birnbaum, who oversees the atelier, and the photographers themselves.

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The three examples from Michael King’s “René Magritte and the Art of Illusion” take staged photographic images inspired by Magritte paintings and pair them with accompanying texts as an homage to that master of Surrealism. The Surrealists loved mannequins and dolls (each being a version of the other). So, adjacent to King’s pictures in an alcove are Larry Bruns’s photographs of mannequins in window displays, “Alchemy,” and Michele Manting’s photographs of dolls, “Innocence Lost.”

The three photographs of lichens from David Poorvu’s “Hiding in Plain Sight” are so big that the subjects take on an almost-geological density. Texture becomes a version of topography, with Poorvu’s lichens outdoing even Green’s leather. Lichens, in a taxonomic sense, have a lot more to do with fungi than leather. Four photographs of the former are to be found in Jackie Heitchue’s “The Poetry of Mushrooms.” Arresting in their own right, the subjects become that much more so, thanks to how Heitchue presents them. Three mushrooms sprouting from a bird’s nest? Another consorting with spools of thread? Sure, why not. And if the juxtapositions are a bit surreal, that brings us back to those Magritte homages and their neighbors. Clearly, people in Winchester have been paying attention.

Gordon Stettinius has 16 photographs in his show “Miss Americana.” Like Sal Taylor Kydd’s “Janus Rising,” it runs through Oct. 20. Stettinius’s title is a triple pun. It evokes a similarly, though not identically, named beauty pageant. The title also plays on the dual meanings of “miss” as predicate: to “overlook” and “to regret the absence of.” Stettinius’s point would seem to be that there are all sorts of overlooked contemporary examples of the old weird America (to use Greil Marcus’s excellent phrase). But it’s a bit of a dubious premise. Seeing pictures of Holyland U.S.A. or the Creationism Museum doesn’t exactly have the force of revelation, though the implicit amiability found in the name of the U.F.O. Welcome Center is cheering. The structure itself is spaceship-goofy, and Stettinius photographs it with a straight-on classicism that approximates a close encounter of the Walker Evans kind.

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Sixteen is also the number of items in “Janus Rising” — “items” because, while most are photographs, she includes two mixed-media sconces and a printed text. The images are in black and white, as are most of Stettinius’s. In both cases, this has a distancing effect. With Kydd, the distance produces an interiority that is strenuously poetical and highly self-aware in its lyricism. An image like “Horseshoe Crab,” though, transcends worked-up effects to enter the realm of dream. It is at once deeply weird, highly specific, and matter-of-factly uncanny.

PHOTOGRAPHY ATELIER 30

GORDON STETTINIUS: Miss Americana

SAL TAYLOR KYDD: Janus Rising

Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, through Sept. 28 (“Atelier”) and Oct. 20. 781-729-1158, griffinmuseum.org


Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.