One of the most telling images in the Museum of Modern Art's beautiful but demanding survey of the Conceptual photographer Christopher Williams represents an act of elegant iconoclasm. It lays bare something most of us rarely see: the guts of a camera's lens. It is an amazing sight.
To make this photograph, Mr. Williams had a Dutch lens collector painstaking cut lengthwise through a German Zeiss Distagon wide-angle lens. Then, working with a studio photographer, Mr. Williams produced a big color close-up of a cross section that is as formal as an official oil portrait, as alluring as a high-end fashion shot and yet as startlingly exotic as an image from National Geographic.
The exposed mechanism, a tight jigsaw of stainless-steel and brass parts building toward the oculus, is intricate and majestic, even a little mystical, akin to the architecture of a chambered nautilus or a great cathedral.
"Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness" is, as a whole, a similar act of exposure. The nearly 100 photographs meander in their own cerebral way through fashion, portraiture, landscape and, especially, still life, and cover more than 30 years of work. But they are only part of a bigger, more complex picture.