Body Work -- Life's A Snap For Christie Jenkins, Whose `Buns' Calendars Get To The Bottom Of The L.A. Look

-- ``Celebrities and Athletes'' is at the Art Institute of Seattle through April 4. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 8 to 6 Fridays, and 9 to 1 Saturdays. The institute is at 2323 Elliott Ave.

Lookie.

Those aren't really photographs. Not, say, in the sense that Ansel Adams or even Annie Leibovitz composed photographs.

No. The photos on display in ``Celebrities and Athletes,'' a new show featuring the work of veteran photographer Christie Jenkins, are something else.

They're pics.

Snaps.

Lots of men's butts, bodies with impressive natural tans and faces with those pained expressions (are little pins being stuck in their feet, perhaps, beyond the frame?) popular in high-fashion images.

But that's not to trash them. Not at all. Jenkins' thoughtfully crafted visions are a special, wonderful kind of pic.

Hers are L.A. pics.

They're mostly an unrelated collection of publicity stills she has taken of the famous and not yet famous. But they totally tell an L.A. story. The show is at the Art Institute of Seattle. Along with artwork that might be described as ``finer'' than Jenkins', the school also regularly features the work of established commercial photographers.

With a lack of irony entirely appropriate for work grounded in the nation's TV capital, Jenkins' pics convey the vacuum-packed essence of a very certain L.A. Where no one is a native and everyone has something in development. Where personal trainers become more celebrated than their celeb clients. Where Gore-Tex fears to tread. That L.A.

Also, the can-I-be-in-the-Buns-calendar-because-I-need-the-exposure L.A.

Jenkins is the creator of the A Woman Looks at Men's Buns calendars, those mischievous date-tellers that became standards for '80s college dorm rooms and office gift exchanges. Her PR sheet credits the ``landmark'' calendars for facilitating the birth of the resurgent beefcake industry.

``I knew that women's fantasies about men begin way before the first kiss,'' says Jenkins, 38. ``We see a man across the street holding his briefcase and waiting for a cab and think, `Hmmmm. Maybe.'

``I felt women were very interested in turning the tables on men. Women had this secret. They had this unvoiced interest in noticing the backsides of men.''

They did. Jenkins sold 800,000 copies of the calendar as well as a coffee-table book.

Jenkins moved to Seattle from L.A. six months ago. She describes herself as always having been ``the girl with the camera'' and has 17 years of experience in photography. She's done international fashion shoots, churned out Hollywood stuff, published in magazines such as Time, photographed at two Olympics, and still travels to L.A. for jobs every three weeks.

Yet she can't leave the buns behind.

And it's her own fault: Other than the sports photographs in her show (including evocative figure-skating photos that have been published in national magazines), almost half of the images feature men's butts.

Butts packed in Lycra. Butts under covers. Wet butts. Pairs of aerobicized buttocks so precisely defined they appear to be forged of high-tensile steel.

But, to be fair, Jenkins' images also feature eyes. Ed Marinaro's straight-ahead sleepy ones. Christopher Reeve's intelligent ones. Mark Harmon's beachy ones. Eyes, says Jenkins, are ``the naked part of our brain.''

Jenkins called her L.A. studio ``Strictly Men.'' Her show features exactly one pinup pic of a woman (in bikini, on beach). She'd rather photograph men than women anytime. Men are more willing to reveal their personalities, she says. Judging by her show, almost all her subjects are fun-loving, happy, secure. Not surprising. She was paid to make them look good.

Many of her photos do capture a bittersweet feeling of the hard and anonymous L.A. world populated by would-be entertainers before they make it. One imagines the unknown Richard Dean Anderson (now the macho star of television's ``MacGyver'') approaching her about a PR still for his portfolio. Perhaps it is unintentional, but a poignancy permeates her shots of Anderson. He looks to be trying hard to be the right kind of TV sexy-tough. He also had dark hair then.

Female subjects are difficult, Jenkins says, because they always want to look flawlessly beautiful, no matter what. Jenkins herself is touchy when it comes to her own image. She refused to have her photograph taken (by The Times) beside one of her pics that showed a prone, underwear-clad man from behind. She doesn't do that buns stuff anymore, she had to say. She says that a lot.

And ``I'm just being a woman,'' she said, mugging for a visiting TV crew.

Jenkins' retrospective makes even more sense when you consider that, for 17 years, Jenkins was a part of the L.A. entertainment-industry milieu. She is a Texan with no accent. The buns canon made her virtually a professional talk-show guest. Like cousins of famous American families, she's a sort of celebrity herself. Her father, Dallas physician M.T. Jenkins, pronounced JFK dead. Channeler J.Z. Knight asked her to photograph her for a book jacket.

And Jenkins made it on ``Dallas'' several times in a small role. She looks like a television actress - a dead-ringer for Barbara Eden. She sprinkled glitter on her shoulders for her show's opening party.

She came closest to clutching true fame when she screen-tested for the title role in the film ``Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'' Three women were asked to audition: Christie Brinkley, Tanya Roberts and Jenkins.

Jenkins didn't get the part.

Like, what's Tanya Roberts done lately anyway?