Richard Ehrlich's 'The Presence of Absence' at LMU's Laband Art Gallery

Richard Ehrlich comes across as a young, emerging artist, in spite of his 70 years. He took up photography as a serious adjunct to his day job in urological surgery less than 10 years ago and has shot broadly and prolifically -- among other subjects, the landscapes of China and Vietnam; abstract crystal patterns; the skies, surfers and lifeguard stations of Malibu; the inner and outer workings of a FedEx hub in Tennessee; seascapes of Vancouver Island; and a community of medieval reenacters.

He's on solid aesthetic ground throughout but still feels somewhat undeclared as an artist, as committed to the beautiful and benign calendar picture as to the intriguing social document. An exhibition at Loyola Marymount University's Laband Art Gallery does Ehrlich a valuable service by presenting a selection of his work unified by a common theme: "The Presence of Absence."

In each of the five series on view, Ehrlich has focused on a site or a population that has been abandoned and photographed architectural or archival remnants that exude loss, trauma, betrayal and decay.

His most substantive contributions to the global image bank come from a series made in a former diamond-mining area of Namibia and another shot in a Holocaust archive. The Namibian photographs, made in 2002, verge on the surreal: wood-framed buildings buried up to their eaves in sand, and houses flooded with the stuff, golden drifts surging through doorways and creeping up cracked, corroded walls.

The area, claimed and settled by German expatriates in the early 1900s, was drained of its treasures within 20 years and abandoned to the forces of nature and time. Ehrlich's images, reminiscent of Kenro Izu's gorgeous views of roots subsuming the temple structures at Angkor Wat, are striking set pieces of an implied tragedy.

Destruction of a distinctly human sort is the subject of Ehrlich's photographs made at the International Tracing Service archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, in 2007. Records at the ITS headquarters document Gestapo orders concerning the mechanics of concentration camps, the organization of ghettos, the exploitation of forced labor and the fate of survivors -- in detail and in essence, the wartime and postwar circumstances of more than 17 million people.