G Ray Hawkins

Works offered by auction by top photographers, including Sid Avery, Greg Gorman, Mary Ellen Mark, Annie Liebovitz, Sebastiao Salgado, Alfred Steiglitz and William Wegman, can be previewed through Wednesday (10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.) at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica, 910 Colorado Ave. Both live and silent auctions of the works will be held Thursday from 6 to 11 p.m. at the Directors Guild in Hollywood, 7920 Sunset Blvd.

For a round of holiday outings along Melrose Avenue, people dressed like character actors. They put on slouchy hats, Jungle Jane minis, swashbuckler coats that nearly swept the floor, Victorian bustle dresses, vintage ties that glistened. The men's hair was longer than the women's. Maybe they were inspired by the performers' pictures displayed on the walls of one party place, the G. Ray Hawkins gallery.

Although some people say it's more fun to think about kissing than actually do it, almost no one will argue that it's more fun to think about "Kissing," a summer group show at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, than to actually look at its nearly 200 photographs of men, women, children, animals, statues, objects and images kissing and/or being kissed.

An impressive panorama of movie stars, presidents, supermodels, rock 'n' rollers and such flash-in-the-pan celebrities as John Wayne Bobbitt greets visitors to a big, entertaining survey of Harry Benson's photographs from the last 40 years. At G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, a handful of pictures of U.S.

At G. Ray Hawkins, Sally Gall's black-and-white landscape photographs work against type. Here, place is rendered all but irrelevant. Instead of heightening the beauty of the lagoons of Bali, the vertiginousness of the cliffs of Etretat or the moodiness of the coast of Scotland, Gall transforms these sites into components of her own conceptual schemes. For a die-hard romanticist, Gall is unusually enamored of geometric abstraction.