A feast for photo lovers Works by contemporary North Carolina photographers are exhibited in two companion shows at SECCA

In 2003 the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh began an effort to build a significant collection of contemporary photography -- a worthy if belated endeavor -- including works by some of the state's more outstanding, solidly established photographers. The museum now owns 105 works by 10 contemporary North Carolina photographers.

Images by nine of them are on loan to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in its exhibition "Contemporary North Carolina Photography from the North Carolina Museum of Art's Collection." It's a strong selection that reflects something of the range of current photographic practice in the state, although it emphasizes place-related and psychological concerns, and is restricted to black-and-white photos.

The North Carolina landscape and aspects of local culture in the state are at front and center in the photos by Rob Amberg and David Simonton. Amberg's focus is the resilience of agricultural traditions in the state's rural areas. His rear view of a dark hooded figure leading a horse through a rickety wooden gate on heavily snow-coated ground, Junior Walking Pet to Water, looks like a candid image from the late 19th century. The tobacco plants in A Field of Cut Burley Tobacco, another highlight among Amberg's photos, are so palpably alive that they vaguely resemble a procession of peacocks.

Simonton's photos consist mostly of straight-on views of time-worn, ordinary landmarks -- storefronts, telephone poles and a field of kudzu, for example -- in North Carolina's small towns and cities. The absence of people or signs of recent activity lends them a haunted quality, like ghost-town scenes, but also heightens their poetic aspect.

Landscape imagery and visual poetry figure prominently in the varied selection of Caroline Vaughan's photographs. Time's passage and the aging process are emblemized in her pair of small, antique-looking landscape photos set in rural Virginia, both views of a densely foliated oak tree easily 100 years old. At first you might not notice the similarly aged-looking man standing under and dwarfed by the tree in one of these images. Vaughan employs the landscape very differently in her photos of slender, pale-skinned women sprawled nude in poetic settings, including an empty, moss-infested swimming pool and an expanse of black, volcanic rocks -- striking images even though the nude-in-nature motif has been done to death in photography.

The wall labels for Margaret Sartor's photographs of children specify their locations in several different Southern states, but it's their domestic settings that render them familiar-looking. By photographing her young subjects from vantage points close to the ground or the floor -- literally on their level -- she encourages viewers' identification with them. When they're visible, these children's faces look distracted, almost haunted, as if they were lost in deep thought, wondering at the meaning of the world around them.

Locales well outside the southern United States are the settings for photographs by Titus Brooks Heagins and Elizabeth Matheson. Heagins' subjects are dark-skinned people and aging architecture of the West Indies, specifically Cuba and the Bahamas.

Matheson goes directly for old-fashioned, Old World beauty in her landscape, seascape and cityscape photos made in Italy and France. The selection of her work is dominated by straightforward, sensitively composed images of details including architectural ornaments in Pisa, classical statuary in Fontainbleau and trees on the banks of the Loire. Human subjects appear only in her photo made in the gardens at Versailles, in which we witness a casual discussion among a few men who appear to be employed there.

The places in John Menapace's photos are so intimately domestic or tightly framed that their larger locales aren't an issue. His sparely meditative views of walls, doors, railings, a chair, pavement, a half-finished glass of milk on a white tabletop and the sinuously curving concrete edge of a garden pond exemplify a distinctively minimalist brand of visual poetry.

Rounding out the show are two of Bill Bamberger's straightforward large-format photos of somber-looking teenage boys and Carolyn DeMeritt's close-up views of damaged antique dolls or doll parts held in people's hands, apt metaphors for the psychological impact of tough life experiences.

The state art museum's images by Alex Harris, another North Carolina photographer, weren't available for the exhibition, but others by him are on view with images by three other North Carolina photographers in "Photo Grids," a more thematically contemporary companion show, also at SECCA.

Both shows were curated by SECCA's interim director, Jerry Bolas. Harris is represented by 21 color photos of his young son in as many different settings, in each case seemingly oblivious to his surroundings while focused on operating the Game Boy device in his hands.

In a related vein, and arranged in a grid, like all of this show's other photos, are Christopher Sims' six frontal portraits of older children participating in a simulated-combat video game used for military recruitment.

Also worthy of special mention are John Rosenthal's six color photos of post-Katrina New Orleans' Ninth Ward, which is rapidly emerging as one of the 21st century's most extensively photographed landscapes, and six black-and-white photos he made of viewers' encounters with art in museum settings.

"Photo Grids" also includes nine close-up photos by Jeff Whetstone of small, freshly captured wildlife specimens -- a bat, a bullfrog, a crayfish, a couple of snakes, etc. -- in plastic containers.

■ "Contemporary North Carolina Photography from the N.C. Museum of Art's Collection" and "Photo Grids" are on view through Jan. 27 at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 750 Marguerite Drive. For more information, call 336-725-1904.