Curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Andrea Dietz, "Matter, Light and Form: Architectural Photographs of Wayne Thom" is a lean and sneakily ambitious show. It has a good deal more to say about photography and design history — particularly the story of Late Modernism in Southern California architecture — than it lets on.

It includes 36 photographs of 17 buildings, in Los Angeles but also in Vancouver, Canada; San Diego and on Navajo land in Arizona, by architects including Giò Ponti, Frank Gehry, Arthur Erickson, A. Quincy Jones, William Pereira and the photographer's brother, Vancouver architect Bing Thom. Fourteen of the pictures are in black and white and 22 in color. They are divided into three categories by building type: plazas, towers and pavilions.

I wish nearly all of the prints were bigger — not Gursky big but roomier. I wish one of my favorite Thom photographs, of the cubic Sears, Roebuck offices in Alhambra as seen from the far side of a wide parking lot, were included here. And the way the pictures have been mounted, under simple sheets of glass that represent a compromise between Thom's desire to show them unframed and Olsberg's interest in giving them some depth on the wall, is not ideal.

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There are no such histrionics in the photographs, nearly all of which are patiently, coolly composed. Especially in black and white, Thom shows a preference for crisp, slanting light and heavy shadow — many of his best pictures, he told me, were taken at 5 a.m. But his photographs tend to be one notch quieter, less overtly glamorous or forceful, than Shulman's, which for all their brilliance were also the pictures of a dedicated salesman, a man happy to be always selling something.

A 1971 photo of the CNA building (now the Superior Court) just west of downtown.
A 1971 photo of the CNA building (now the Superior Court) just west of downtown. - The CNA photograph is probably the best known of Thom's career. ("That picture put me on the map," he said.) The building, standing against a pure blue sky, reflects clouds that are otherwise out of frame, as if they're trapped in the facade. The effect is to make a painterly building look even more so. The photograph nods toward Shulman and Magritte at the same time. © Wayne Thom / WUHO Gallery

Architecture, through the lens of Wayne Thom’s camera, is sculpture. For more than thirty years, Thom has captured, in image, the surfaces and depths, the shapes and textures, the contrasts and reflections of the objects of the built environment within their urban galleries. ... His still life depictions unveil an idealized portrait of the inhabitable world, exposing the ultimate ambition of the architectural work as that which renders existence as art. (from the Exhibition Website)