Youth is not wasted

There are a few larger points to make about the selection. Most of the photographs are in color. Straight photography predominates, but there's room for lots of experimentation. Few of the pictures owe anything to photojournalism.

That's about it.

Those characteristics aren't necessarily indicative of any larger trends or cultural forces. Rather, they're simply a function of specific circumstance and individual skill, as are most good photographs. In fact, the greatest virtue of "Flash Forward 2008" may well be that it's so hard to generalize about its contents. This makes the show hard to review, - but all the more rewarding to look at.

As part of Flash Forward, Magenta gives a Bright Spark Award as a kind of best in show. This year's winner is Adam Makarenko. One look at the four pictures the Griffin has up from his "Miniature Apiary Series" and you can see why. They're the damnedest things. Makarenko combines miniature sets, faux-apocalyptic lighting, and pictures of bees. If people kept beehives on the Vegas Strip (not a bad idea perhaps), they might look like this.

Like Makarenko, Becky Comber skews her pictures with unexpected procedures. She employs collage techniques and rephotographs portions of her images through shards of old glass. She gets very striking effects, achieving a more pointed emotional acuity through visual blurriness.

Erik Boker slices open toothpaste tubes, then photographs the results. Don't laugh - they look great. The colors are luscious, the textures gooey, the overall effect very nearly indescribable. It's soft sculpture for the eyes (teeth, too).

James Pomerantz's "Mud Bath, Bibiheybat, Azerbaijan" is a real grabber. The sight of an elderly man largely submerged in brownish muck can't help but get a viewer's attention. A fair number of the other pictures here are of faraway places: the Gaza Strip, the Yukon, the Urals, northern Saskatchewan. Those last were taken by Eamon Mac Mahon in a place called Uranium City. Was Raymond Carver ever tempted to trade in his typewriter for a camera? Had he done so, he could have been Mac Mahon.

Some of the most foreign-looking images aren't necessarily situated that far away. Lucas Foglia focuses on "off-the-grid" communities in the United States. Has the young woman in "Homeschooling, Tennessee" lowered her head on her arm out of despair? Weariness? Or the better to concentrate? As for the two women in "Rita & Cora Aiming, Tennessee," they look like Amish sharpshooters.

Foglia's subjects are uncomfortable with the present. Damian Berger reaches out to the past in a different way, through artistic allusion. His "Homage to Lartigue, Sardinia, Italy" bows to that long-ago master - while his "Hula Hoops" less overtly (and humorously) cites a more recent master, Garry Winogrand, and his famous underwater view of a woman sharing a swimming pool with her pig.

Sabrina Russo chooses a novel way to combine past and present. For her series "Shaking," she prints her color portraits of people (who are all captured in the act of nodding) on old newspapers. She's one person, at least, who'll miss newsprint when it's gone.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.