Charles A. Hartman Fine Art

Each image in the Hartman show -- a mix of portraits and landscapes -- articulates a craftsman's considered touch and eye, from the click of the camera to the laborious hours Steinmetz undoubtedly spent in the darkroom. Those were hours well-spent: The light in many of these images is, to paraphrase from a past interview with Steinmetz in another publication, a revelatory force.

Women often appear fragmented, adrift and disembodied in the dreamlike collages of Toshiko Okanoue. The profile of a blond beauty tops a body composed of ballerina legs and playing cards in "Dance"; a swan and the bust of a brunette model shoot across the water in Leda in the Sea; and a bright, smiling glamour girl illuminates a dusky scene in Streetlamp.

Okanoue made these collages between 1950 and 1956, just after the devastation of World War II. Composed of photographs from Life and fashion magazines, the works feature dreamlike vistas and idiosyncratic humor in line with what was at the time a relatively new language for art. Surrealism hasn’t been in vogue for a while now, yet Okanoue’s output has a timeless sensibility—like an older, lesser-known cousin to contemporary collages, such as the notable output of Marnie Weber and Wangechi Mutu.

Included are nearly all of Link's iconic images of steam trains and small-town Americana, as pictured by an off-duty commercial photographer fascinated by railways and epic lighting scenarios. Link portrayed the dying steam train industry of the 1950s with the same unapologetic sentimentality he applied to small-town life. In image after image, locomotives barrel past fresh-faced teenagers and hardworking farmers, roll like clockwork through Edward Hopper-esque towns of sweet loneliness, and signify the promise of economic growth throughout the coal belt.

In capturing the private goings on of his subjects, Langer's pictures suggest the nudes of the Impressionist Edgar Degas, whose paintings of nude women engaged in their private daily rituals and habits had a voyeuristic clinicalness.

But Langer's pictures have a more benign quality to them. And, like Kenna, Langer strives deeply to achieve a cool formality. You're seeing a world in motion, but not a world moving naturally, and a world held at an emotional distance, too. It's a deliberately constructed world of shadow and mood.

In "Selections 2004-2009," themes of human density once again occupy Peterman's meticulous photographs, as the artist juxtaposes vast landscapes of sublime emptiness with claustrophobic metropolises of impenetrable saturation.

Peterman goes for the wide shot in his muted, spare images of the American Southwest. The standout among his desert photos, "White Sands III," depicts the blanched landscape just as the cloudless, dust-filled sky turns the same shade of off-white as the dunes below. Like a glaucomatous mirage, the desert threatens to vanish into a monochrome abyss.

This is a breezily-paced historical show whose individual works would fit quite well in the Portland Art Museum's photography collection. And while it's not an extraordinarily unique sampling by any measure -- Portland has welcomed such works regularly in the past through other commercial art venues -- the quality is affirming. The Portland art world needs the consistency of these kinds of shows.

In mid-June, four days after his interview for this profile, photographer Corey Arnold left Portland for a two-month odyssey to Bristol Bay, Alaska. As this issue goes to press, he is on a commercial fishing boat, catching and gutting salmon by day, sleeping in an abandoned salmon cannery by night, and photographing these eerie environs—and their eccentric habitués— whenever he can steal a moment to click a shutter. With their exotic imagery and narrative quality, Arnold’s portraits, seascapes and landscapes have an offbeat appeal that sometimes veers into the absurd, mythic and grotesque.