ART REVIEW : Rural Innocence Lost in Salisbury Photos

John Patrick Salisbury’s black-and-white photographs at the Stephen Cohen Gallery of his teenage cousins Drew and Jimmy are intimate, disturbing and, in the end, ordinary--albeit in an unexpected way.

Shot in the Sacramento River Delta, in and around the small town that was founded by Salisbury’s grandfather’s great-grandfather and in which Salisbury’s family still lives, these images incarnate a Huck Finn kind of boyhood.

Here is the American ideal: two brothers traipsing around the woods, splashing in the water hole, wrestling, lying in the tall grass and killing time. And yet the innocence one anticipates is absent. The brothers never smile. They brood, stare off into the distance, turn their backs on each other. In one image, Drew poses against a wooden fence, his arms raised over his head like St. Sebastian. In another, one of the brothers spreads apart the wings of a dead bird, as if orchestrating a crucifixion.

The Gothic sensibility is appealing in its way, but the spiritualism is not deeply felt. It is a gloss, spread thickly across the surface. And yet this highly aesthetic double portraiture depends on it; so, too, does it depend upon a certain homoeroticism, which ties the work unavoidably to Bruce Weber’s many campaigns for Ralph Lauren. Here, then, a family history devolves into another essay on male beauty. Beauty is always welcome, to be sure; but in this case, it can be a bit anticlimactic.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.