Hammerbeck's quasi-archeological Depositions of the early Seventies, and subsequent saturated landscapes, prefigured her current interest in the desert. Her choice now, however, to "see what is there instead of what I think is there" and to approach the land not as "landscape" but as real, direct experience, marks a radical change in attitude. These are landscapes without beer cans, RVs, billboards or other human evidence. Hammerbeck has chosen to go where the litter isn't and not to look where it is. In these large color prints, there is the palette of hand-colored postcards (Monument Valley, Arizona and Bruneau Dunes, Idaho), the vastness and wonder described by Watkins and O'Sullivan (Pyramid Lake, Nevada and Bryce Canyon, Utah), and an inherent trust in some timeless, natural order (Coral Pink Sand Dunes, Utah). Phoenix, Arizona traces the process of entropy on a dying cactus which bisects the landscape with a broad, broken vertical. A kind of dryness pervades these scenes where we do not expect it; certainly the brownish weeds on Kona Coast, Hawaii are not what other photographs have predicted. In Near Green River, pale, striated dunes crumble into the waiting sand -- slowly, inevitably. Only Sun Valley, Idaho, with its Misrach-like light-on-vegetation, interrupts the silent inviolability of these scenes.

Ironically, the apparent permanence of this territory is contradicted by the destruction of ninety percent of the negatives in the recent Design Conspiracy fire. Nothing persists, neither the landscape nor its imitations.

Art Rogers's selection from his decade-long portrayal of the Point Reyes community is also defiantly traditional and conservative. His virtually neutral color and familiar compositions direct us to look past the fabrication of the photograph into the subject -- the people, their homes and belongings, their definition of community. Rogers's portraits deny much of what the media tells us "California living" is about. His characters are nice people, friendly, open and secure. In some measure, both Rogers and his subjects have chosen to be where they are precisely in order to sustain the value systems implicit in these photographs -- wholesomeness, integrity, and traditions persisting from an earlier, less complicated time.

The Point Reyes images are eminently readable: Louie Ricci, Livestock Auctioneer centered among a maze of local ads for roofing, feeds, nails, cars, cattle and credit; and Trudie 9 months pregnant, with Bruce cuddling before a mammoth, orderly wall of books which invites us to scan the titles and speculate that someone in the house might be a lawyer, belong to a book club, or love to read. In Mr. Conway's Garden, where the proud flower-grower leans on his shovel, and in The Guldager Sisters, which employs every convention of such portraits -- including the reflected-historical-reference photograph -- traditional format supports the concept of respectable stability which permeates the exhibit. Even Mommy the Painter, whose studio is shared equally by Baby and unremarkable watercolors-in-progress, is seen without the kind of ambivalence and snideness which characterized Bill Owens's Suburbia and rendered his photographs far more memorable than their inhabitants. Ordinary stuff, this: first day of school with tortoise, firefighters in mismatched slickers, the bishop and the priest before the altar. These photographs, which might have been boring, are not, because Rogers seems genuinely involved with the individuals and their lives. Two images break with formal conventions: Hermann at 99 is a singular, rather spare, portrait of an old man seated before two identical white doors, one of which opens at the far left of the frame, the other at the far right, suggesting the cycle of entering and exiting life. Hermann, though a little uncertain, grips his cigar and cane firmly and waits with dignity. Cecil with Cody the Beer-Drinking Horse is a disconcerting reminder (because of its acute wide-angle distortion of the local pub) that these are, after all, really only photographs. Rogers's solid, placid, likable and insular community, like Hammerbeck's monumental, empty landscapes, like all photographs ultimately, is in some part fiction because it is only those parts of reality that the photographer chose to notice.

What is the significance of these heroic, idealized, optimistic views of what is left of the West? In a decade which produces -- simultaneously -- punk rockers, fundamentalist religious revisionists, depression-level unemployment, vast social disintegration, and the threat of nuclear annihilation, perhaps there is something necessary and reassuring in these personal photographic affirmations that unspoiled landscape and people in a real community exist and are worth seeing.

Wanda Hammerbeck, "Pyramid Lake, Nevada," 1981, Type-C print, 17" x 25".

Art Rogers, "The Guldager Sisters," 1980, Cibachrome print, 16" x 20".