The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 51

CALENDAR Cos Amides (Times San Diego County Tuesday, October 22, 1985 Part VI SAM MIRCOVICH PHOTOGRAPHS UPSTAGE THE IMOGEN STORIES 1 1 rjr" VI' vw By SUZANNE MUCHNIC, Times Art Writer When an interviewer asked the 92-year-old grande dame of photography how she made a living, Imogen Cunningham snorted, "By being a hack, of course." She was never a hack even the portraits and other commercial work that paid her bills were distinguished but she has never been fully appreciated as an innovative and accomplished artist. As a personality, yes. Who could resist a young wood sprite who made romantic photographs in the forests of the Northwest? Or, better yet, a crusty old pixie who wore a black published. Local writers proclaimed her "an immoral woman" and her modest nudes "inexcusably vulgar." She put the negatives away for 50 years and directed her energies to less provocative pictures. Cunningham and her husband, etcher Roi Partridge, moved to San Francisco in 1917, where she became a compatriot of Adams, Edward Weston and other champions of "straight" photography.

Abandoning misty pictorialism for the crisp clarity of sharply focused images, she hit her stride in cropped close-ups of flowers and plants. These works from the '20s won her international JJ I) A acclaim and are considered classics. In the exhibition she presents an amaryllis, a magnolia, an aloe, an iris and a pair of callas as sculptural forms. They still look terrific but it's impossible to imagine how astonishing they must have seemed 60 years ago. Cunningham's photography rarely drifts to the far edge of abstraction and it never strays for long from people.

Human faces, hands, personalities and nude forms persistently intrigued her. A portrait of Gertrude Gerrish (circa 1920) is a study in fluid form; her wavy -haired head seems to float and her floral-print dress is an undulating sea of pattern. A crisp picture of Spencer Tracy in an angular, architectural setting is an example of the portraits of "ugly men" she took for Vanity Fair in the '30s. Dozens of artists and photographers also posed for Cunningham, and they are well represented in the exhibition. The most bizarre image in the show is also the most recent: A 1976 portrait of Irene (Bobbie) Libarry presents a flabby nude woman who wears tattoos as if they were a lace garment.

This photo brings Cunningham's work back to its inception by pointing up her fascination with strange appearances. Though best known for pictures that clarify form, she had an abiding interest in the intrigue of obfuscation. cape and a silver peace sign as she swept through the streets of San Francisco? She was photographed, filmed, quoted and fawned over during her last years, and she reveled in her celebrity. Cunningham died at 93 in 1976, leaving an entertaining legacy of Imogen stories that has obscured her contributions to photography. Now "The Photography of Imogen Cunningham: A Centennial Selection," an exhibition at Pomona College's Montgomery Art Gallery (through Nov.

7), puts her work under the spotlight. It's difficult for mere pictures to compete with tales of a feisty little old lady sparring with Ansel Adams or turning down an offer to pose as "the mother of photography" for a Virginia Slims ad. (She countered the offer with a request for the cigarette company to give her "a paying job photographing all the horrible women But as Cunningham's personality fades into the background, her photographs hold up very well to the unaccustomed exposure. The traveling show was organized by Susan Ehrens, a photography historian and author of a forthcoming biography of Cunningham, and photographer Leland Rice, under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts. In celebration of the artist's 100th birthday, the curators selected 100 black-and-white images from American collections.

These works are augmented with publications featuring Cun Richard "The time comes to look to the future." RICHARD CARPENTER BUILDS SOLO CAREER "Amaryllis," above, "Spencer Tracy, 1932' are in centennial show of work by Imogen Cunningham, below right in 1967 photograph. He was the guest pianist in Sunday's concert at Garden Grove's Don Wash Auditorium. Carpenter had a special reason for doing the show, his first formal appearance here since his sister's death: the symphony's new conductor, Edward Peterson, attended Downey High School with Richard and Karen. It was a pleasant surprise to see Carpenter so relaxed backstage. In the years since Karen's death, he has tended to be tense and guarded around the press.

But he seems to be in a better frame of mind now that he's looking forward to getting back to work. The singer and pianist is in the process of recording his first solo album for Records, the Carpenters' label since 1969. He hopes to do some regular pop concerts when it is released. "I enjoy performing and recording very much," he said, sitting on a folding chair. "The two of us will always be the most important thing musically in my life, but I don't want to retire." Carpenter also doesn't want to dwell on the illness' that took Karen's life.

"I want Karen to be remembered as a great singer, not as an anorexia victim. Since she passed away, she almost seems to be remembered more for that at times. Please see CARPENTER, Page 10 ByPAULGREIN The green room in this case was yellow, and rather small and drab. The only major piece of furniture was a cardboard table that held Styrofoam cups and a box of Wheat Thins. But Richard Carpenter was feeling too good to let any lack of backstage amenities bother him.

Receiving a visitor before going on stage Sunday to perform with the Garden Grove Symphony, he cracked: "Welcome to big-time show biz." Carpenter didn't even seem to be fazed by the billing he received on a poster advertising the show. It listed him as Richard Carpenter "of the Carpenters," presumably to remind fans with short memories of his role in the most successful pop duo of the '70s. "If they had asked me, I would have said, 'Don't list it that Carpenter acknowledged. "But it's all right. They had to do that sometimes even when we were hot." It's been nearly three years since Carpenter's sister, Karen, died at age 32 of complications from an eight-year bout with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder in which victims suffer from a pathological loss of appetite from psychic causes.

And Richard Carpenter, 39, is starting to step out on his own. ningham's pictures and some additional photographs of the artist and her family. Not conceived as a thorough retrospective, the show nonetheless indicates the breadth of a career spanning seven decades. During her long, productive life Cunningham was a pictorialist, a realist and an abstractionist who chose as her subjects people plant forms and architecture. Her range suggests that of a dilettante, but it reflects a richly varied commitment.

As her work grew and developed in half a dozen directions, it retained her characteristic light touch and refinement. When asked to explain how she made a particular picture, Cunningham was likely to say something like, "Oh, I was just messing around," but it doesn't take a connoisseur to see that she was both artist and innovator. Her sensitivity to different papers and processes is especially clear in this show because the vintage photographs are all printed by Cunningham. As a young woman working near Seattle and studying in Europe, she took romantic, soft-focus landscapes. Always open to new approaches, she applied the spatial concepts of Japanese prints to her photographs and followed the lead of Pre-Raphaelite painters by staging dreamy portraits tableaux in the woods by her studio.

Cunningham's free-spirited father had taught her that men and women are equals, but she learned otherwise when her photographs of nude men were JIM AL1NDER ELLEN JASKOL COPLEY AT HELM FOR TCHAIKOVSKY OPERA DON BARTLETTI Angeles Times a IL A Jt. By KENNETH HERMAN SAN DIEGO-Twelve years ago an aspiring Australian tenor had the good fortune to work under John Copley, noted Covent Garden opera director, in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro." Saturday at Civic Theatre, San Diego Opera's Ian Campbell the same tenor, now turned opera company director will return Sicqq the favor by present- COUNTY ing Copley's produc- tion of "Eugene Onegin." "Eugene Onegin." the first Tchaikovsky opera San Diego has attempted, along with next spring's contemporary chamber opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, "The Lighthouse," represent the programming changes Campbell is implementing during this first season free from the planning influences of former director Tito Capobianco. Copley arrived in San Diego two weeks ago from San Francisco, where his lavish production of Handel's "Orlando" with Marilyn Home bowled over that opera-crazed city. Not surprisingly, Copley's inventions and innovations divided the critical community: half complained that he gilded the Baroque lily overmuch, while the rest praised his magical staging British opera director John Copley will produce the San Diego Opera production of "Eugene Onegin" by Tchaikovsky. TV SERIES ON CIVIL RIGHTS DUE By CLARKE TAYLOR NEW YORK-Television's first full-scale history of the U.S.

civil rights movement of two decades ago is now under way with blacks at the helm. Planned as a series of six hour-long episodes covering the years 1954-65, "The Eyes on the Prize" is projected for the 1986-87 season on the Public Broadcasting Service. This is an excellent time for such a series because there is "an entire generation who has little recollection of that era" and many of the participants are still around to tell them about it, said Barry Chase, vice president for news and public affairs programming at PBS. Public television stations and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have provided more than $1 million of the $1.4 million now on hand for the series, which is being produced by Blackside a 17-year-old, Boston-based, minority-owned production company. "This is not intended as a series about the black civil rights movement, but about a period of American history, of which the civil rights movement was key," said Henry Hampton, executive producer of the series.

The completed project will consist of film footage from the 1950s and '60s, much of which the producers hope to obtain from one or more of the three major television networks, plus contemporary interviews with more than 100 participants on all sides of the civil rights struggle. Those to be interviewed include former members of the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson adminis-Please see TV SERIES, Page 10 Images from performance of "RareArea" at VCLA's Royce Hall. STAGE REVIEW COATES MAKES THEATER OF IMAGES AND SYMBOLS solutions that salvaged Handel's ancient dramaturgy for modern audiences. "I want to change audience expectations," explained Copley in an interview between rehearsals. "We need jolting up a bit the audience needs to think a bit more.

Opera hasn't developed visually as much as it should have in the last 10 years." By SYLVIE DRAKE, Times Theater Writer Controversial but not brazenly iconoclastic, the 52-year-old Copley now reigns as principal resident resident director of Great Britain's premier company, the Royal Opera, where he has worked some 25 years. Trained as a dancer "and as a set designer, as a costume designer, and everything else to do with the theater," he added with characteristic insistence Copley served his apprenticeship during the heady postwar revival of the British stage. "I saw lots of really good things when I was growing up in Birmingham," he said, "especially Paul Scofield's repertory company, in which Peter Brooke directed. At that point, all of the great companies came through Birmingham, and we saw the best players before they went on to the West End." In the 1970s, Copley's star ascended with his productions of what some people derisively call Please see COPLEY, Page 4 'hat is your position on 'W! dismemberment?" asked an audience by this master of effect and his crew Way of How," "Are Are," short on logical progression. It is a theater of images.

Images appeared in clusters that segued and seduced without coalescing: A fast-changing succession of massive architectural forms impressions of layered stone archways-gave way to veined landscapes and gutted machinery surrounding black holes. In them, glowing bodies, floating in spatial darkness and seen through filtered slats, defied gravity at odd angles. Please see PERFORMANCE, Page 6 INSIDE CALENDAR ART: "Paul Brach: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1956-1985" at UC San Diego is reviewed by Robert McDonald. Page 3. JAZZ: Maiden Voyage reviewed by Don Heckman.

Page 2. MUSIC: Dennis Day has teamed with his sister-in-law, Ann Blyth, for a rare performance tonight in Torrance. Page 5. RADIO: Highlights. Page 10.

TV: Tonight on TV. Page 7. Howard Rosenberg's mailbag. Page 10. wiseacre at the start of a post-performance discussion of "RareArea" at UCLA's Royce Hall on Saturday.

It was not a malicious, but a humorous and perfectly pointed question. "RareArea" is the latest creation by George Coates Performance Works, again visually and aurally stunning, but, like previous work.