SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Enigmatic Mexico : The surreal world of Manuel Bravo’s photos is a mix of ancient verities and urbane sensibilities.

To call Manuel Alvarez Bravo Mexico’s best-known photographer, as do the organizers of the exhibit now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, may be misleading.

Does his fame mean that the retrospective will offer a tidy, conclusive vision of Bravo’s country? Not really. The work in this important show, assembled by San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts with funding by American Express, avoids pat cultural touchstones or familiar stereotypes.

Bravo’s Mexico is a place of ancient verities, of pre-Cortez mythology always brewing beneath the surface, but also of urbane sensibilities. This is a show steeped in enigma and earthiness.

With odd cropping and strange scenery, he transforms female nudes into mythical figures. He freely traffics in puns of both the literary and visual sort. He visits places of industry and of death, but with a keen ironic detachment. And he turns street scenes into surrealist riddles (Bravo consorted with surrealism’s ringleader, Andre Breton, among other art-world cognoscenti).

Bravo’s commanding but sly work arrives at a time when Mexican art is more visible in Southern California than ever before, given the mammoth Mexican show that closed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art two weeks ago.

Some Ventura County locals may be familiar with Bravo’s name, ironically, by association with his much lesser-known ex-wife. Photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo was one of the artists in the fine exhibition “Campaneras de Mexico: Women Photograph Women,” which stopped at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art last year. Lola Bravo’s portraits of Frieda Kahlo in the show were especially bold and memorable, more so than Manuel Bravo’s cool Kahlo portrait here.

At the SBMA show, Manuel Bravo’s work over the past six decades offers its greatest rewards to its most patient observers.

“Squash and Snail,” from 1928, might be considered a left-handed tribute to one of Bravo’s early role models, Edward Weston. But whereas Weston found the sublime in minute views of natural subjects, the subject here is a visual pun--the snail shell mirroring the larger gourd--and an homage to a lowly, slimy creature.

Bravo loves a good, canny title, which may or may not conceal meaning. “Flower and Ring” depicts the objects of its title, but on a skeletal X-rayed hand that seems to foreshadow death.

One of his best-known images is the surreal and deliberately peculiar “Good Reputation Sleeping” of 1938-39. In it, a young woman, naked except for bandages around her groin and feet, sleeps on the ground. Forbidding thorns lie in front of her, as, we imagine, she and her good reputation enjoy a good, cleansing rest.

After the reflexive shock of seeing a pool of blood flowing from a young man’s head in “Striking Worker, Assassinated,” we recognize the shot for what it is. Bravo’s is a near-elegant depiction of an everyday martyr, in a culture where cycles of life and death have had an often-violent relationship dating back to the Aztec rituals of sacrifice.

And so it goes with the show. Matters of life and death, sexual energy and social reportage, concrete facts and abstract truths, hover beguilingly around Bravo’s work. Like the best artists in his medium--whatever their point of origin or cultural breeding--Bravo has relied on photography to defy rational explanation and get beneath the skin of things.

The late photographer Marion Post Wolcott, who, with her husband, Lee, made her home in Santa Barbara from 1968 until her death at age 80 a year ago, had a relatively brief period of active duty in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. But she also left an indelible mark on the history of American photography.

As one of the photographers working in Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) project during the Depression, Wolcott toured the back roads of America, compiling a portrait of a nation, from its most indigent rural corners to the affluent enclaves. Her eye for composition and sense of compassion made her work especially significant.

Wolcott always had an amiable, unpretentious presence in Santa Barbara, supporting local photographic interests. She herself was put center stage in a large exhibition of her FSA work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in the summer of 1988, a show covered by national media.

Given her generosity of spirit, it’s fitting that the current exhibit of photographic gifts to the museum collection is in her memory. Several prominent locally based photographers have donated works, including Bob Werling, who did Wolcott’s darkroom work toward the end.

This sampling also serves as an unofficial look at some of the cream of the local photography crop.

Timothy Hearsum, the SBMA photography curator at the time of Wolcott’s ’88 exhibition, contributes a photograph of his own from rural America.Sensitive sociology and art mix in Jesse Alexander’s portrait of a boy in a transition house, and in Ginny Brush’s shot of an elderly woman in her cluttered retirement hotel room.

Richard Ross deals expertly with a tightly defined space rather than folks--in this case, a sumptuous image of a Far Eastern shrine titled “Pagan, Burma.” Jeff Brouws captures the timeless appeal of a neon-lit Mobil station.

From photographers outside this area code, there are Harry Callahan’s people-less Portuguese street scene and Mary Ellen Mark’s portrait of a streetwise teen-ager.

A few telling Wolcott images are also on display. One is a racetrack scene where smug, anxious spectators peer over a hedge-covered wall at their daily prospects. By contrast, in another scene an old black man snoozes while a boy crouches, eyes full of wonder and blissful ignorance, beside a run-down shack in the South.

We also see Wolcott’s now-classic snow-covered street in Woodstock, with a halo of light around the street lamp. The image skirts the edge of Currier and Ives-esque romanticism. But somehow it transcends cheap sentimentality.

In her later years, fragile health prevented Wolcott from shooting much, and respiratory problems kept her out of the darkroom.

But her eye wouldn’t quit. In a 1988 interview at her home in downtown Santa Barbara, a wry but weary Wolcott commented, “I see things I’d like to photograph. It keeps you alive and clicking, if not clicking with a camera. I’d love to be younger and get into documentary filmmaking.”

Then she grinned bittersweetly and shrugged.

“Next life,” she said.

* WHERE AND WHEN

“Revelaciones: The Art of Manuel Alvarez Bravo,” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. through February 12; “Gifts in Memory of Marion Post Wolcott,” at the same museum through March 29. Information: 963-4364.