ELLEN LAND-WEBER’s exhibition—coincident with the publication of her monograph The Passionate Collector—reveals an aspect of her work entirely different from the machine process imagery for which she is well known. For the past two years Land-Weber has collected “collectors,” traveling around the United States making portraits of individuals and their possessions. The collections run the gamut from the expected: bells, angels, license plates, antique glass; to the less common: cash registers, credit cards, carousel horses, and paperback copies of Catch 22; to the downright bizarre:

KENNETH SHORR’s “Happy Idiots” photographs appear as open wounds that are disturbingly brutal. The ten triptychs shown consist of media and snapshot images which have been enlarged to a 20-by-24-inch format, then torn, burned, layered, and finally violated with red paint.

Shorr’s work reveals the formal influence of his L.A. mentors Robert Heinecken and Judith Golden. But his photographs are unique in that his alterations do not function as embellishment, but rather as an aggressive, even anarchistic metamorphosis. The source material includes pictures of Kennedy, Mao, Carter and Brezhnev, the