Art: Photo images large, multifaceted

A museum collection that contains 100,000 prints and drawings and more than 30,000 photographs offers a potential cornucopia of exhibitions for visitors who otherwise would never get to see most of this material, and who might never realize that such a massive archive even existed.

Curators are the middlemen who bring the two together. They select, organize, interpret, and artfully display items normally stored in cabinets. They can either feature individual artists or groups of artists, or they can organize an exhibition to examine a theme.

Two curatorial fellows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, John Vick and Julia Dolan, have chosen the second option, which they have realized in side-by-side shows called, respectively, "Skyscrapers" and "Spectacle."

Each show draws on the extensive resources of the collection of prints, drawings, and photographs cited above. Both themes are multifaceted, and go beyond ordinary aesthetic considerations.

Besides the obvious subject of architecture, "Skyscrapers" addresses history, urban development, and modernism while alluding to social progress.

"Spectacle" is a bit more nuanced. It involves not just the perception of an event that attracts attention but also the idea that the word spectacle posits a dynamic between event and/or object and onlooker. You can't have one without the other.

As an exhibition, "Spectacle," an installation of 46 photographs, contains more surprises because some of its images contradict the popular conception of a large-scale happening seen by hundreds or thousands of people.

Burk Uzzle's photo of a man looking through an underwater window at Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state proposes a more minimalist view. The "spectator" is staring at a single fish swimming past the window. One man, one fish. Is that enough for a spectacle? It was for Uzzle.

Beginning with Eugène Atget, Dolan has put a number of famous photographers into her show, from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander to Josef Koudelka, Sebastião Salgado, and Robert Capa. The majority of the prints are black-and-white, and date between 1883 and 2002.

One of the color prints, acquired specifically for the show, depicts birders at Hawk Mountain in Berks County. It's by David Graham, one of several photographers from this region. Another is Jack Carnell, who photographed a national marbles competition in Wildwood, N.J., in 1982.

Neither of these photos seems, at first glance, to qualify as "spectacle." Yet this show continually challenges viewers to consider why ordinary pursuits and happenings such as peering at birds through binoculars or watching boys play marbles should be special.

This is especially true when such images are juxtaposed against more conventional spectacles, such as a crowd in St. Peter's Square viewing the Pope (by William Klein) or Cartier-Bresson's 1962 picture of a somber crowd gathered in a Paris street, occasion unidentified.

Dolan's thesis holds that "spectacle" comes in many sizes and shapes, but it always involves people looking at something that attracts attention, piques their curiosity, or moves them emotionally. Friedlander's Mt. Rushmore, South Dakota cleverly inverts the equation by focusing on the viewers, not on the monumental attraction.

Street photographers like Klein, Frank, Uzzle, and George Holton tend to capture the most typical "spectacles"; Klein's 1965 image of a heart-attack victim lying on a Paris sidewalk typifies the unplanned event that becomes spectacle in retrospect.

Their photos create an armature to which Dolan has attached less orthodox evocations of spectacle. As she suggests, "Look for the range of emotions that spectators display. Doing so opens up the definition of spectacle and spectators."

At 65 objects, "Skyscrapers" is a slightly larger exhibition; the material is divided almost equally between photographs and prints, with a few drawings. Here the iconic building type, and all that it implies about American culture, rules.

Curator Vick had more than 500 images of skyscrapers at his disposal. He selected examples that placed skyscrapers in several contexts.

Some, like the Empire State Building under construction, document landmark transformations in the urban landscape. Some images symbolize progress and the advent of modernity.

Other images suggest the impact that the buildings had on neighborhoods. There's even a section devoted to skyscrapers at night, one of the most romantic representations of urbanity.

As a rule, photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Sherril Schell dramatized and idealized skyscrapers, a proclivity that began with Alfred Stieglitz's famous 1903 photo of the Flatiron Building in Lower Manhattan (not in the show, although he is represented by two other images).

Artists also became fond of looking up the sides of skyscrapers at an angle, a perspective on tall buildings that eventually became a cliché.

Yet they also were inspired to manipulate the form, as John Marin did in his leaning towers, or to use skyscrapers as atmospheric backdrops for urban bustle, as Childe Hassam used the Flatiron Building, one of the first skyscrapers built, in his etching Washington's Birthday - Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.

The exhibition's timeline, 1908 to 1941, covers the period when skyscrapers became ubiquitous in large American cities, especially in New York. This gives the show a historical dimension, and suggests a narrative that blends urbanization, architectural innovation, and economic vitality.

The modern American city comes to life through these views of the building type that came to define American entrepreneurial initiative and commercial vitality.

The two exhibitions are installed next to each other in the museum's Berman-Stieglitz galleries, which, for this presentation, have been configured into separate spaces. Neither depends on the other, but together they reveal the depth and richness of one of the Art Museum's most fertile collecting areas.

"Spectacle" continues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, through Sept. 7. "Skyscrapers" continues through Nov. 1. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 8:45 p.m. Fridays. Admission is $14 general, $12 for visitors 65 and older, and $10 for students with ID and visitors 13 to 18. Pay what you wish Sundays. Information: 215-763-8100, 215-684-7500 or www.philamuseum.org.

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