By Michael O'Sullivan

Friday, February 25, 2000; Page N43

"REFLECTIONS in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present" is, as advertised, an epic narrative. In fact, the story the exhibition tells is so big and so broad, so multifaceted and, in fact, so contradictory, you may find yourself suffering from brainlock while wandering through its warren of interconnected galleries. Mounted by the Anacostia Museum and Culture Center, the show is on view at the Arts and Industries Building on the Mall while the Southeast Washington museum undergoes renovation through spring 2001.

More than 300 images by 120 photographers hang cheek by jowl, spanning a century and a half of mechanical image-making, from formal daguerreotype portraiture to digital montage. Any one of the three chronological subsections--"The First 100 Years," "Art and Black Activism" and "Black History Deconstructed"--would make a fairly comprehensive survey in and of itself. As a matter of fact, when the show hits the road this summer, it will be sent around the country in piecemeal fashion, with only two of the nine venues getting the whole shooting match.

When you enter, you're even given the choice of turning to the left and starting with the present (Carla Williams's fragmented self-portrait "A Virtuous Negro's Head" from the artist's 1990-91 "How to Read Character" series), then working your way backward, or turning to the right and starting with the past (the cameo-sized daguerreotypes of Jules Lion and Augustus Washington from the 1840s), then working your way to the present.

It matters little: The story, or rather the stories, on view here are the same regardless of the direction you read them in.

As the title suggests, "Reflections in Black" is like a mirror, but in that glass emerges not one face nor 300 single faces but a complex, composite portrait of a people. As cultural critic bell hooks is quoted on the significance of the medium for her race, "The camera was the central instrument by which blacks could disprove representations of us."

That is to say, from its invention in the mid-19th-century, the camera would be immediately adopted as a tool by which blacks could document, even define, themselves, warts and all, outside the dominant culture's limited, and often limiting, stereotypes. So there's the sadness and dignity of Gordon Parks's 1942 "Ella Watson with three of the five children she supports on her salary of $1,080 a year, Washington D.C." (heck of a title, isn't it?) and the black-is-beautiful cheerleading of Gregory McNeal's 1997 "Heritage, Saturn's Ring and Rain." There's the pride and power inherent in Robert L. Haggins's series of Malcolm X portraits from the 1960s, and there's the quiet sense of shame festering beneath James Presley Ball's series of 1896 photos of William Biggerstaff, a former slave accused of (and hanged for) the murder of a man he claimed attacked him.

There are pictures of juvenile gang members jailed in L.A and of those who fought to end segregation, pictures of processed doo-wop singers and churchwomen in their Sunday-go-to-meeting hats, pictures of baptisms and old Civil War sites. There are the anonymous (a wheelchair-bound man at a Promise Keepers rally) and the famous (Haile Selassie and Booker T. Washington), the good (Martin Luther King Jr.), the bad (Lou Jones's "Portraits from Death Row" series) and the ugly (the 1965 Watts riot).

In the contemporary photos of "Black History Deconstructed," probably the show's most challenging section, there's a navel-gazing fascination with hair (Bill Gaskins), physiognomy (Carla Williams) and notions of ethnic purity (Remy Gastambide)--with what it literally means to be "black" today. But at the same time, there's a nostalgic concern with ancestry, with memory and with a yearning for the past.

Curiously, an unusual number of artists have begun to incorporate text into their work as a way of making the implicit explicit (Dennis Olanzo Callwood, Albert Chong, Chris Johnson, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems and Cynthia Wiggins), yet sometimes the most effective means of saying something is the simplest, as with Ron Tarver and Adrienne Odom's blurry, dreamlike images of a romanticized past shot through the plastic lenses of their inexpensive "Diana" cameras.

Walking through the sometimes rambling (but more often rewarding) "Reflections in Black" can feel a bit like trying to sight-read an orchestral composition: When regarded too closely, regardless of sequence, the images register merely as individual notes on a vast, symphonic scale. In your mind, you may be able to hear each of the myriad instruments intoning its separate sound, but it is not until you play back all the voices together that it becomes sweet music.

REFLECTIONS IN BLACK: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present -- Through June 30 at the Smithsonian Institution's Arts and Industries Building, 900 Jefferson Dr. SW (Metro: Smithsonian). 202/357-2700. Web site: www.si.edu/anacostia. Open 10 to 5:30 daily. Free.

Related programming: On April 7 and 8 from 9 to 5, the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture and the Howard University Department of Art will co-sponsor the 11th annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art, titled "Converging Images: Printmaking and Photography in African American Art."

On April 7, the day-long session takes place in the Armour J. Blackburn Center on the main campus of Howard University, 2400 Sixth St. NW (Metro: Shaw/Howard U) and on April 8 in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's Ring Auditorium, Seventh Street and Independence Avenue SW (Metro: L'Enfant Plaza). Also on April 8 from 5:30 to 7, there will be a reception in honor of the publication of the exhibit's companion volume, "Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present" by curator Deborah Willis. Admission is free. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-seated basis. To register or for more information, call 202/357-4500 (TDD: 202/357-1729).