SIGHTS AROUND TOWN : Focus on the Southwest : Fifty years later, Horace Bristol’s sensitive color portrait of New Mexico is put on public display.

As a prominent figure in photojournalism and one of the early Life magazine staffers whose work left an imprint on the collective consciousness, Horace Bristol has been a keen-eyed witness to some of this century’s most dramatic moments.

In particular, Bristol produced a series of Depression-era images of migrant workers in California. His partner on the journalistic project was one John Steinbeck, who thereafter transformed his encounters into the epochal novel, “Grapes of Wrath.”

That body of work, as well as images from World War II, have been significant calling cards lately for Bristol, whose work has, in the last few years, been revived and celebrated in numerous exhibitions and publications.

At 84, the photographer, who lives in Ojai and spent a fair portion of his life in Ventura County, is belatedly coming into his own. Not surprisingly, Bristol’s ascending visibility makes him a hot property these days, subject to close scrutiny--especially in his hometown.

What we see at his modest-but-attractive exhibit in the window of Jaffe’s Camera in Ventura is a selection of color images from New Mexico. Overall, the show is mild-mannered compared to his more gripping work, but it serves as an informative piece of the puzzle in terms of Bristol’s saga.

In 1939, Bristol was assigned by Life to shoot a profile of life in New Mexico, in the then-new and fragile format of 4x5 Kodachrome film. Only 50 years later, Bristol was sent back his transparencies and now has put them together for the first time in exhibition form at Jaffe’s.

Bristol’s “Grapes of Wrath” images, shot just a year before his New Mexico assignment, were often tightly focused on careworn faces and were highly personal portraits. But the New Mexico work is more objectively distant, and thus packs less of an emotional wallop.

A smattering of cattle seen from afar appear like a brush stroke of bovine on a landscape; a mother and her two sons are dwarfed by the sweeping contours of sand dunes. We also find Native American celebrations shot with anthropological detachment, and a pueblo church that becomes a study in stark, primitive geometry.

The most memorable image of the lot is equal parts crisply composed visual ambience and kitsch-in-retrospect. Two cowboys on horseback have a smoke under a threatening sky, flanked by scrappy cacti. A layer of snow sits on the hard Southwestern ground.

They look, in hindsight, like cowpokes from a B movie or a cigarette ad.

If the individual works aren’t consistently gripping, Bristol’s “New Mexico Life, 1939” imagery must be put into perspective for full appreciation. For Americans, Life magazine was a weekly window on the world and New Mexico was then a relative frontier--this, even before Los Alamos had its legacy as the birthplace of the Bomb.

Through his rich photographic annals now coming into view--of which these images are but a small footnote--we’re getting a slowly unveiling, composite view of Bristol’s travels. And, by extension, of our own past.

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At the Momentum Gallery in Ventura, “El Dia de los Muertos” (“The Day of the Dead”) is a continuing saga. The day after Halloween, a parade and celebration that began at the West Park Recreation Center made its way to the gallery, which features a selection of altars, both traditional and non-traditional.

With its various constructions, masks and other crafty materials, the gallery has been effectively transformed into frenetic tableaux. The impressions are of ghostly beauty, festive designs, dark humor and, on closer inspection, often sobering themes.

Among the departed being memorialized here are beloved family members, such as in Elizabeth Pliscou’s elaborate tribute to her grandfather, or Kim Louck’s altar of family remembrance.

But there also is a timely emphasis on commemorating victims of AIDS. Richard Peterson’s “The Nine Lives of Johnny Gomez” is particularly poignant, with its crucifix-shaped arrangement of boxes detailing the early death of a family man.

On a lighter note, Doug Lipton uses a boudoir setting to pay homage to Marilyn Monroe, replete with flickering electric candles.

The show springs out of the ritualistic “Day of the Dead” tradition and becomes, if not a show with uniformly high artistic standards, a cast-of-many forum for community input.

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A few doors down, at the underdog V2 Gallery in the Livery Arts Center, “Figurative Foray” is the current theme upon which the artists play.

The figure is not a happy one in the case of Gene Schklair’s sodden, nude plaster man--a depersonalized white George Segal-like figure who lies in a tub of woe with a bottle of bubbly in hand.

The theme gives Charles Fulmer cause to explore further his curious series of portraits of languid women and anthropomorphic hounds. Omar de Leon’s marvelous “Nocturne family outing with the Holy Ghost in 1929” is another of his folksy, subtly surreal scenes.

And there, again as always, is Lipton, Ventura’s assemblage king, who has been known to use everything but the kitchen sink in his art. Lipton’s self-portrait as a skeleton, his “Our Lady of Choc-Mal” and “Tricktych,” a torso fitted with images of male beefcake prostitutes--advance his reputation as a prolific local art prankster.

It’s hard to avoid sensing some kind of poetic justice in the fact that Lipton shows his works in a neighborhood where plentiful thrift stores and knickknack emporiums enhance the prospects of finding “found” objects.

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Out on the fringes of Art City II, the gallery’s current “Over the Edge” show offers its wall space to the photography of John Forbes, while Michelle Chapin fills the gallery floor with her sensuous stone sculptures.

Forbes’ Cibachrome photos, mostly of weird landscapes and ancient architectural details from Europe, have been altered by a chemical process. Rendered psychedelic, like visions from rock concert light shows of old, these images seem to amount to an ode to the Old World by way of the Haight-Ashbury.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* “New Mexico Life, 1939,” photography by Horace Bristol, through Dec. 14 at Jaffe’s Camera, 2640 E. Main St., Ventura. Info: 643-2231.

* “El Dia de los Muertos” through Nov. 21 at the Momentum Gallery, 34 N. Palm St., Ventura. Info: 652-2820.

* “Figurative Foray,” through Dec. 1, at the V2 Gallery, 34 N. Palm St., Ventura. Info: 641-9405.

* “Over the Edge,” photography by John Forbes, sculpture by Michelle Chapin, through Nov. 20 at Art City II Gallery, 31 Peking St., Ventura. Info: 648-5241.