A soulful look at spiritual sites

An exhibition of contemporary art with the title ''Places of the Spirit: Sacred Sites of the Adirondacks" suggests works of the kind of grandeur that the 19th-century Hudson River painters found in wilderness settings such as the Adirondacks, which they portrayed as pristine Edens unspoiled by humans.

The show at the Boston Athenaeum is instead primarily devoted to architecture, to humanity's imprint on the landscape. The buildings are mostly houses of worship, erected in fields and forests or by the shores of lakes, but there's a sprinkling of cemeteries, shrines, and statues of saints as well.

The show was organized by the Lake Placid Institute for the Arts and Humanities, which initially put out a call to 110 communities in the area, asking for information about their ''sacred sites." The response to this provocative request was a wealth of documentation. The alchemy of turning that information into art began with a guest curator, Mara Miller, who chose four photographers -- Heather MacLeod, Romaine Orthwein, Barry Lobdell, and Shellburne Thurber -- whose styles are sympathetic to the theme. To the credit of everyone involved, the result has nothing of the forced feeling of so many group shows on a particular subject.

Among other things, the exhibition acts as a primer on religious architecture in the Adirondacks in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of it falls into the ''Carpenter Gothic" category, borrowing the vaulted verticals of European cathedrals but scaling them down and executing them in local materials -- wood far more often than stone. In settings of such sublime natural beauty, it seems odd that so many of these churches make heavy use of stained glass that seals out the landscape.

While 19th-century painters tended to idealize the American landscape, to the point of editing out evidence of the tourist business already flourishing, the photographers in the Athenaeum show don't omit telephone wires crisscrossing the skies or garish plastic flowers in shrieking shades, ''planted" beside a grave.

MacLeod works primarily in black and white, which gives her images of village churches a distant, vintage feel, as if she'd photographed them in the era when they were built. She wisely stops short of the phony antique blur effect, though: The shadows that ripple over her clapboard-clad chapels are as crisp as those in Charles Sheeler's photographs.

Orthwein creates an intriguing and elusive narrative. A ghostly woman in white, mostly seen from behind, moves through her pictures. Sometimes the figure is so tiny you barely see her. Sometimes she's translucent and insubstantial, and seems to be walking through windows. Sometimes she's far less subtle a presence, as when she climbs the exterior of a church tower. In another shot she strides with great determination toward a chapel, as if intent on finding spiritual guidance inside.

Lobdell is harder to pin down. His ''Teahouse" is saturated in quiet blues. A canoe, paddled by a tiny figure, glides through a misty lake to a tiny spit of land with a Japanese-style pavilion, connected to the mainland by a Japanese-style arched bridge. Towering pines at the left balance the otherwise horizontal composition. This is the most self-consciously ''artistic" image in the show, and the loveliest, which is probably why it's the one on the cover of the catalog. (This slim yet opulent volume is highly recommended for the anecdotal information not found elsewhere in the show.)

Hanging just under ''Teahouse" is a Lobdell work of a very different sort. His ''Duane Methodist Church" stands in strong sunlight, rising above the tall trees in the background. A tiny structure, it's also a commanding one.

Boston-based Shellburne Thurber will be the most familiar of the four photographers to local viewers. Her signature pictures are of out-of-the-way, deserted, and decrepit buildings, but she was also commissioned by the Athenaeum to record the august institution's renovation and expansion several years ago. It's good to see her work back in the building.

Thurber, like Lobdell, has a photograph called ''Duane Methodist Church," but her picture of this building is an interior shot. She's a poet of illumination, and warm golden light pours through the church's stained-glass windows onto the rich brown wood of the walls and pews. While Lobdell makes this church seem autocratic and austere, Thurber, through that glorious rich light, makes it welcoming, as she also does in ''Essex Senior Center." The peeling paint of this interior actually reads as a plus, a nod to the history of a structure built in 1835.

Thurber has another photo that stands out as an oddity in the context of this show. Her ''Child's Grave" is a large color print of a tombstone in winter. The rugged stone with a carved lamb on top is half hidden in snow and stands against a blank white background. In front of the stone are gaudy pink flowers, obviously fake, perhaps a tribute left by someone who did not want this child forgotten, even if it meant hiking through a blinding blizzard.

Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays.