Surprising animal close-ups

The photographer Henry Horenstein is best known for his books - he's written more than 30, including highly regarded photography textbooks (he's a longtime professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design) and monographs of his own photographic series.

Exhibitions of his work have been harder to find, but Philadelphians have had two recent opportunities to see Horenstein's prints: Five months ago his quirky first series, "Close Relations," shot between 1969 and 1975, was shown in the University of the Arts' Hamilton/Arronson Galleries; now Gallery 339 has a show of photographs from Horenstein's latest monograph, "Animalia."

When Horenstein was a RISD student himself, his first influences were Robert Frank and Danny Lyon, whose documentary road-trip photographs defined American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. After getting his master's degree in 1973, he continued to document friends and family, then took on the country music scene and horse racing.

At some point in the mid-1990s, however, Horenstein did an abrupt about-face. His documentary portraiture gave way to an austere, modernist style that is more reminiscent of the work of his RISD photography professors Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Like Siskind's studies of architecture and nature, Horenstein's close-up investigations of humans and animals, isolated as you would never expect to see them, are almost abstract. Like Callahan, who would stick to the same main subject for years (he photographed his wife, Eleanor, for at least 15), Horenstein now seems genuinely obsessed with the body. (Another muse for this work of the last decade or more might be John Coplans, who had parts of his own body photographed, thereby documenting his own aged feet, or buttocks, at close range.)

Most of Horenstein's animal images are surprising, and frequently catch the intrinsic humor of the body. Sometimes they're a little too cute, like the cropped view of the domestic pig's snout, or the sweet, soft-focus mug of a harbor seal. But his shot of an African grey parrot's head from the back; a smoky giraffe's upper legs; a Komodo dragon's eye; a cownose ray seen straight on, floating limpid in the water, and a poodle's midsection, are witty and enchanting.

Those who know William Cromar's art only from his installations, particularly the affecting "Gtmo," at Eastern State Penitentiary (a facsimile of a Guantanamo cell set within an exisiting cell, on view through 2008), can learn more about his ideas and processes in "Past Present," a 10-year survey at the Design Center at Philadelphia University.

Cromar, who teaches architecture at Philadelphia University, has been developing an alternate body of work that he calls "maps" for his larger installations. They include folded-paper pieces, wall drawings and paintings, and sculptures, all of which involve geometry and which seem to consciously resist perfection. A simple, wall-hanging sculpture of bent wood veneer is painted black on its exterior and part of its interior. Two of five drawings feature large black geometric shapes; the other three have only faint outlines of shapes.

Comar's vertical, black-painted wood sculptures look wonderful in this modernist house, echoing its geometry and ebony-finished wood floors. He has also commandeered two black fireplaces for small installations of black-painted wooden balls. If it weren't for the early dates of some of these works, one would think they were made specifically for this venue.

Several of Cromar's unpainted wood sculptures bring Martin Puryear to mind, particularly the ones made with manipulated veneer. Two pieces in which black nylon stocking is stretched over black-painted balls are vaguely evocative of Louise Bourgeois. Otherwise, Cromar is outlining his own poetic world of imperfect order.