The year 1839 marked a global watershed like no other before or since. Time travel, romanticized in song and lore for centuries, had become a reality. Finally, man had harnessed the power to experience his past and, with any luck, to archive it unto infinity. An innocuous, sticky canvas, a little natural light and a boatload of perseverance would transport humanity to its roots, redefining its stamp on science and culture and its perspective on its tenuous place in the universe. All that\u2019s to say that 1839 was the year photography went public. Cameras, after all, are time machines, faithfully recording our every move, sometimes even over our protests. For good and\/or ill, the art is a foregone, big-time reality \u2013 and we\u2019ve had the foresight to preserve it as a vital tool in our legal system, in our affairs of government and in our development of personal taste. As of 3:15 last Wednesday, La Jolla had exactly 751,412 photographic art galleries, covering exactly 751,412 topics of interest and types of fare. One of those has found a niche in vintage work, some by artists nobody knows. Another totally rocks the hinges off its own total roof. Two more find themselves at the center of a popular social agenda. Four venues, four temperaments \u2014 four links to one crucial art form and its appeal to the time traveler in all of us. “Anyone wants to learn something that they don\u2019t already know,” says Joseph Bellows, owner of Joseph Bellows Art Gallery (7661 Girard Ave., 456-5620, www.josephbellows.com). “As much as I like to sell work, what interests me is discovering a photographer whose work I had not previously known about and discovering a body of work that was produced 20 or 30 years ago. We pay very close attention to the quality of the print, too.” For Bellows, guys like Jack Teemer and Bevan Davies come to mind. Teemer is the poor man\u2019s high-society photog \u2014 dilapidated laundry and ragtag landscapes call to dilapidated, ragtag pasts and the remarkable people behind them. Davies\u2019 stock in trade involves the dwellings in which those people might have lived given another time and place. Old buildings dot the periphery of the tacky houses and apartments he immortalized in the \u201960s and \u201970s. While Ansel Adams may have built a career on his infamous sunrise photo, Teemer and Davies speak just as eloquently to the human pain and hope heralded beneath the daybreak. “It\u2019s becoming very difficult to buy photographs by these master photographers,” Bellows says, “especially very well-known images. Collectors are looking in other areas of collectibility, into the \u201960s, \u201970s and \u201980s. Some of that work is really exceptional. For whatever reason, [those photographers were] not recognized. That\u2019s what we enjoy doing \u2013 learning about someone who fits very neatly into the history of photography.” Take Henry Diltz, for example. Not only is he a singular figure in the annals of the art, he\u2019s the guy who captured the lion\u2019s share of seriously big names in another field you love. If you have any kind of handle on album jackets and live performance from the \u201960s and \u201970s, you know Diltz\u2019s work \u2013 and at any given time, you can find it at The Morrison Hotel Gallery (1230 Prospect St., 551-0835, www.morrisonhotelgallery.com). Diltz spearheaded the whole rock photography movement, in fact, which would come to include major figures like original Rolling Stone lensman Baron Wolman and Bob Dylan\u2019s good friend Elliot Landy. And Morrison co-owner Rich Horowitz notes the upshot on an almost daily basis. “People get very, very emotional,” Horowitz says, at the likes of a Joplin or a Hendrix or a McCartney or a Morrison frozen in time, their visages speaking to a generation\u2019s misery and hope. “They walk in the gallery and they look around \u2013 they\u2019re just really taken, and they go, \u2018This was my life!\u2019” Whereas cameras are time machines for the rest of us, music is Horowitz\u2019s transport mode of choice. “A record will still take me to a moment,” he says, “and the moment is very, very vivid in my memory. Fun times, happy times, sad times \u2013 that\u2019s what records and music do for me. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s the same for the people who come into the gallery. There\u2019s just a very visceral feeling inside when they see the images.” And puh-leeeze don\u2019t mistake the gallery for the original Morrison Hotel, which is in L.A. As iconic as that place may be, the gallery is merely its imagerial counterpart. The gallery is named, in fact, after the second-to-last album The Doors recorded before Jim Morrison\u2019s death in 1971. Diltz, as you may have guessed, took the cover shot for that one, too. He\u2019s forged a seminal bond with those glorious days, and the Morrison puts that bond well within our reach. That effort isn\u2019t lost on Tom Mangelsen, whose work as a nature photographer was fueled by his career as a wildlife biologist. Today, the Thomas D. Mangelsen Images of Nature galleries thrive amid the message his expertise implies: Man and nature are inseparable parallels in ecological success or failure, with man the sole determinant of the direction. Mangelsen has 16 galleries throughout the U.S., with La Jolla\u2019s Images of Nature located at 7916 Girard Ave. (551-9553, www.mangelsen.com). Manager Kathy Hatch, who\u2019s been with the local venue for 16 years, said Mangelsen\u2019s popularity is a product of that new awareness. “What was popular back then was close-ups,” she says, “as though you were shooting through a gunsite instead of a camera. And photography in the \u201970s wasn\u2019t considered anything close to art. But now, with environmental movements such a [big item], he\u2019s known for natural history. His signature pieces are those pictures where there\u2019s a small animal and a large landscape, showing habitat and showing behavior and hoping to educate people through his artwork that way.” Ten years ago, Hatch adds, polar bears enjoyed a flash-in-the-pan popularity amid those nicely animated TV ads for Coke. “Now,” she says, “they\u2019re an issue again because of global warming. It\u2019s interesting because [Mangelsen] just sticks in there doing his thing, doing his work. His photographs are touchstones. They\u2019re reminders, in a nice way, of what we should be aware of and what we actually need in our little citified life.” And if Mangelsen has increased consciousness about wildlife, the Bartram Gallery (7874 Girard Ave., 459-9797, bartramgallery.com) can maybe make the same claim when it comes to natural habitat. Founder Jesse Bartram Donovan and eight other photographers take to the open air in their endeavors, replete with a kaleidoscope of colors and nuances \u2013 and for Donovan, older methods of capture are best. “There\u2019s a debate going on between the film and the digital photographer,” Donovan notes, “but I prefer to use the film camera because of the size of the images I can print. And there\u2019s a lot of technology today. If the photographer shoots with film, [he\u2019s] still able to change the light on the image, like with digital. “Also, film is more thought-provoking for me. When I go out to a location, I get about 12 shots per roll, so I\u2019m very careful about what I shoot. I think that causes me to slow down a little bit.” When the topic is time travel, slowing down is a good thing. That way, human subparticles have a tendency to stay intact through the ages, and their owners have a chance to digest the essence of time behind the few square inches of metal and glass that make up their equipment. That\u2019s the way of all things in today\u2019s photographic environment, as the art permeates all quarters and dispositions. La Jolla\u2019s 751,412 repositories (as of 3:15 last Wednesday) are testament to that effect, and you only have to visit four to get the point.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The year 1839 marked a global watershed like no other before or since. Time travel, romanticized in song and lore for centuries, had become a reality. Finally, man had harnessed the power to experience his past and, with any luck, to archive it unto infinity. An innocuous, sticky canvas, a little natural light and a […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"Climb into a time machine","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11560,11551,11593],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-la-jolla-village-news","category-news","category-no-images"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}