Contemporary Americans are responding to Richard Avedon's portraits of Westerners the same way their 19th-century counterparts responded to pictures of the Western landscape. Gazing at Hudson River School paintings of the westwardly inclined frontier, our forebears were overcome with reverence and awe. They proclaimed Manifest Destiny the new American creation myth.

Concepts of "ownership" may have broadened to include photographic means of appropriation, but some things never change. Spiritualism and mythical thinking coexist (mushily) with the much vaunted pragmatism in our national psyche. For example, I overheard this exchange - and several others like it, I kid you not - while visiting Avedon's exhibition, In the American West: "The West must be full of drifters," observed one viewer. "Yes," her companion agreed. "It's a long way to California and not everyone makes it to the promised land."

As must already be apparent, the real subject of Avedon's recent exhibition is the myth of the American West. That the landscape is largely absent from these images is entirely irrelevant. Geography is a flimsy rationale for the psychic terrain Avedon inhabits, anyway, and that's precisely why this body of photographic work is such a fascinating mess.

Avedon's early work on the five year project that yielded these photographs promised more auspicious results than he's since delivered. When the University Art Museum in Berkeley mounted the definitive Avedon retrospective in 1980, he premiered the first picture from the Western series, shot in March of the previous year.

I described it at the time as "a complex, myth-invoking image of an androgynous adolescent holding a dead rattlesnake in the configuration of a lyre...its entrails draped across [the front of] his T-shirt." It remains a compelling photograph, simultaneously the most staged and least mannered in the show. Avedon achieved perfect emotional pitch in this potentially all-too-evocative conjunction of innocence and knowledge, sexuality and death, nature and culture. Miscalculations of tone often undo his pictures and it's the rare Avedon photograph now where the subject or the photographer's exertions aren't visible.

In a recent interview in Newsday, Avedon noted that in 1979 he imagined that the Western project would assume the form of a meditation on masculinity. Traces of this idea linger in certain images, including those of an effeminate-looking Navajo cowboy and an aging Marlboro Man lookalike which graces the back of the Abrams book accompanying the exhibition. (The book, by the way, is far more satisfying than the show because of the reduced size of the pictures and the formal correspondences between photos paired on facing pages.)

While the pictures of the Navajo cowboy and Marlboro man are not especially resonant vis-à-vis that of, say, the boy and the rattlesnake, it seems a pity that Avedon didn't pursue this line of photographic inquiry. Masculinity - the intricacies of identity and their projection in image and advertising - is what he knows best. What he opted for instead is far less clear.

I'm guessing that he enlarged his conceptual field of operation in order to allow himself more room to move, to discover - in Sam Shephard-ese - the True West. Unfortunately Avedon's view of the West is fatally clichéd. Its denizens are miners, ranchers, carneys, drifters, Loretta Lynn Fan Club presidents, mental patients, and prisoners. It's the (South) West familiar from movies and plays including Badlands, Uforia, Places in the Heart, and Paris, Texas, as well as numerous Shephard plays.

It's doubtless irrelevant to point out that the West is nothing like this: that Westerners read more books per capita than people from other parts of the country; that they tend to make more money; to live in condominiums, and the like. What we're concerned with here has nothing to do with fact. Avedon trafficks in myth, and, indeed, these are photographs entirely free of irony or the impuse to debunk.

This is also what makes them so airless. Avedon's obsessive need to differentiate his "art" from his commercial efforts precludes the possibility of any evidence of chance or play enlivening this work. The narratives he put in the mouths of the young women advertising Calvin Klein jeans on TV surely contain as much "truth" as the grimly puritanical/populist platitudes about self-reliance and hard work his sitters are made to embody. Only they're a lot more fun.

August Sander and Diane Arbus seem to be the disparate sources of inspiration for the images comprising In the American West. Like Sander, Avedon supplements each of his pictures with the subject's occupation: "meat packer," "janitor," "oil field worker," "12 year old," etc. He also notes the subject's name, the date and the location of the sitting. For both photographers, this conveys an impression of documentary evidence or facticity that the images themselves belie.

Sander's appeal for us stems in part from the conceptual dimension of his enterprise. That some correlation might exist between people's appearance and their work, and that this might be worthy of investigation, is an essentially Victorian notion. At one time or another, most of us have tried to guess the occupations of Sander's sitters without looking at the titles. We are forced to rely on the clues provided by clothing or other props and we're inevitably doomed to (pleasant) failure.

Avedon has, of course, utilized a labeling device similar to Sander's in his portraiture of the past. With his famous subjects, it's functioned only as a sort of informational footnote. With the Western portraits, the titles or captions are forced to carry additional weight. Confronted by the grave young girl on the book's cover and the exhibition announcement, for instance, we turn to the caption for meaning. It reads "Sandra Bennett, twelve years old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, 8/23/80" - which tells us only that Avedon was a sucker for Bennett's limpid eyes and extraordinarily freckled skin.

Unlike Sander's "sociological" approach, Avedon's orientation is distinctly psychological. He has always been drawn to the marginal. In his past work, fame separates his subjects from the rest of us. (Is it possible he never realized that the key to his work has been the exploration of the slippage between public and private realities, between the complex layers which comprise identity for that class conditioned to being photographed?) The motley crew of Westerners in the current work is made even more remote through eccentricities of occupation or appearance. Such visual "foibles" are not limited to mere physiognomy, but range from a female factory worker's birthday corsage of dollar bills to similar-looking tattoos of Jesus engraved on the chests of similar-looking prisoners. What is fair to image-rich celebrities, however, may be totally unfair to jus' plain folks and downright cruel to a mental patient presented as one happy fella. At the heart of Avedon's enterprise is a streak of misguided sentimentality. Although he says, without irony, that "Here [in the Western photographs], I have a lot of strong feelings for these people," none of his feelings appear to be exactly loving.

Less distinguishes Diane Arbus' photographic freak show-of-an-oeuvre from Richard Avedon's than one might imagine. Perhaps the major difference between them is one of tone and attitude. While Arbus sometimes sympathizes to the point of frighteningly unambivalent identification with her sitter, Avedon imposes his systematic sensibility on them. That his portrait of a "nuclear fallout victim" differs astonishingly little from any of the others attests less to Avedon's interest in picturing nuclear fallout as an invisible killer than to the essential opacity of photography, the naiveté of our belief that appearance is nothing more than a text waiting to be deciphered, and Avedon's penchant for making the bizarre everyday and vice versa. When it comes to emotional range, there isn't any.

En masse, his over-lifesized portraits begin to resemble the arid Western landscape itself. Every well-washed pair of Levis, every pore and crow's foot of every subject's face is revealed in microscopic detail. If we didn't have a hierarchy of subject matter and a mania for categorization, we might consider Avedon as much a landscape or still-life artist as a portraitist.

He presents us with this landscape of the body in the surreal form of dozens of bees on the body of their keeper, in the form of mud caked on oil workers' faces, or in the water dripping from a corpulent, unidentified migrant worker (or "wet back"). Whatever his feelings about these people, In the American West is less a valentine to humanity than to the variegated textures of the physical world.

For years now, Avedon has been touting his new work as the centerpiece of his comprehensive, career-long "portrait of America." He believes that In the American West demonstrates his concern for ordinary people. Perhaps genuinely embarrassed by the cult of celebrity and fashion he's done so much to create, he tries to distance himself as far as possible from the journalistic and fashion photography he continues to pursue. None of this, of course, would matter much if it didn't so thoroughly affect and inflect the "art" work.

It is this tension, coupled with his ambition, which seems to account for the mannerism or strain one feels in much of Avedon's "art" work. Tension invigorates; nervous energy simply consumes itself. In true Ab-Ex fashion, Avedon has done his damnedest to will the great American photograph(s) into being, an activity on a par with writing the great American novel or nabbing the great white whale.

Will, as a projection of the artist's personality, is precisely what we respond to in these photographs. The world has been banished from them. Ultimately, In the American West is more than anything else a portrait of Avedon's own mental state. Instead of the myth of the West, he's shown us the myth of the late modernist artist in Western society.