Gowned Series concentrates on an anonymous woman floating in a pool. She is clothes in a delicate, translucent nightdress; her face cannot be seen. From very fragmentary evidence, the viewer must assemble a reading of these images -- a reading which will draw upon psychology and detective fiction, fantasy and melodrama, archetypal symbols and advertising.

Perhaps some narrative is hidden in the gesture of one hand tensed beneath the water, blood-red polish on the fingernails; or of the arched foot stepping into pink depths, a flourish of black hem at the ankle (#12). Or is there an erotic intention at work? Certainly eroticism is implied by photographs in which the figure floats languidly in a peach gown above a tier of submerged steps (#4), drifts in a bluish nightie which reveals parted thighs (#9), or arches up from the surface of the pool to expose -- just barely -- a firm breast draped as if it were classical sculpture (#11). In all of these images, the woman might be displayed for the pleasure of a lover, or the arousal of a voyeur. Her green-wrapped body near the bottom of the pool portends something very different. Does her fetal crouch suggest the solace of a deeply buried dream or a futile defense against some awful danger? Water can also be a place of fear and death. Seeing the lavender-gowned body facedown (#8), framed by a spread of dark hair and with limp arms above the head, the viewer must suspect that the woman is dead -- the victim of drowning or suicide.

The vocabulary of pose and gesture in Gowned Series is that of a forensic photographer; the intonations of soft focus and printing, and pale hand-coloring, are the language of dreams and poetry. But any real understanding of what they say, of what interior force might hold these disparate pieces together, is frustrated by Klutinis's uncertain use of the notion of series. A series, by definition, must be "related by order of occurrence, especially by success." It is this order of occurrence which gives coherence to the series' constituent images. Despite the use of a single character and setting, Gowned Series does not structure the symbolic or narrative connections which might assemble the parts into a meaningful whole. The viewer is left with a mystery which offers what seem to be significant evidences, but which admits of no solution, nor even any real access to the questions. How does a woman in her nightgown come to lie in the water? Who is watching her and why? Are these the waters of the physical universe or some other realm?

If hard data is minimal in Klutinis's series, in Alan Morton's Shore Studies it is virtually encyclopedic. With the thoroughness, ostensible objectivity, and attention to detail which are characteristic of a social scientist, Morton documents the collective behavior of sunbathers at one edge of the Pacific Ocean. Like the best anthropological photography, Shore Studies gives the appearance of having been made without prejudice or opinion. Through Morton's nearly invisible attitudinal filter, the activities of the subject group -- a ritual displaying of nearly naked, oil-coated bodies to one another and to the searing sun -- seem curious behavior indeed.

Morton first establishes scale -- the relative size of subject population to natural environment -- and then behavior. In Two Bicycles, half-a-dozen people rendered almost in miniature against a huge, buff-colored rock formation arrange themselves equidistantly and face in diverse directions so as to maintain a maximum, though illusory, solitude. In Girls and Birds, the tiny child and scavenger birds, hardly more than minute specks scattered at random on vast ashen sands, pick at scraps of flotsam. Although subsequent frames clearly prove that large unpopulated beaches are atypical, much effort is apparently extended on maintaining the illusion of privacy even in the midst of oppressive density. Thus eye contact or conspicuous ogling seems proscribed except in actual encounters, as in Santa Cruz Beach #4, where several young women look at the photographer and a number of sleek young men flirt with each other. (If the sunning ritual is related to mating rituals -- and certainly lying around semi-naked suggests such a relationship -- the viewer cannot always ascertain what the rules might be from this photographic evidence.)

Only a minority of the subject group physically enters the ocean, and then usually covered with skin-tight black rubber (Capitola Beach South). The primary activity here is lying prone or supine, and burning the epidermis to a culturally desirable brown. Closer inspection of these shore sites permits studies of tools and artifacts peculiar to the scene. Morton discovers certain things in almost universal use -- beer cans and Styrofoam coolers, canvas deck chairs, inflated plastic rafts and animals, scraps of fabric covering the genitals and sometimes the head, and a ubiquitous oil applied to all skin surfaces (Picnic Tent).

Shore Studies is not a bona fide anthropological document, of course, but art. One proof of this is the infusion of that hypercolored palette characteristic of Cibachrome; another is the undercurrent of wry wit which informs a number of Morton's pictures. Passive crowds of bathers are contained by a zoo-style cyclone fence (San Lorenzo River); a school of beached creatures that might be fish proves to be a scattering of abandoned boats (Kayaks). With clarity, genuine social curiosity, and a fine sense of the absurd, Morton provides insight into one of Homo sapiens' more inexplicable collective acts -- the seasonal migration to water's edge and ritual submission to ultraviolet radiation.

As individual exhibits, both Gowned Series and Shore Studies are worth seeing; exhibited as a pair, they are surprisingly complementary, balancing the arcanely symbolic with the anthropologically evidential. Intelligent and reasonably daring curatorial choices seem to be the rule at Frog Prince.

At a time when serious economic pressures on institutional, alternative, and commercial spaces alike have limited exhibition possibilities, the business-plus-gallery has become significant, since it depends neither on public funds nor entirely on art sales. One problem inherent to such galleries is that many are little more than glorified shop windows promoting frames, cameras, printing services, etc. Frog Prince has managed both to avoid that conflict -- maintaining an independent curatorial staff which selects work regardless of whether or not the artist is a client in their color lab -- and to mount consistently worthwhile exhibits.