Monterey Museum of Art blends two photographers from their collection.

Monterey Museum of Art’s new Takin’ it to the Streets photo exhibit, comprised of works by Robert von Sternberg and Pirkle Jones from the museum’s collection, is slightly misnamed, but don’t let that get in the way of a good photo show.

Jones, a San Francisco photographer who studied with Ansel Adams and Minor White, captured important California social movements with a sepia-toned documentary look that’s steeped in the 1930s but has aged well.

He teamed up with Dorothea Lange to document the shuttering of the California town of Monticello, which was submerged by a new lake formed by a dam constructed in the 1950s. In the late ’60s he photographed an insular and eccentric community of hippies living in houseboats in Sausalito called Gate 5.

He and his wife, photographer Ruth-Marion Baruch, documented the Black Panthers in Oakland in 1968; one of the most famous of this series is of five women Black Panthers with afros, black clothes and raised fists.

Pieces from each project are represented in the exhibit, showing an impressive breadth of California culture, landscape and politics. They zoom in and out of the various scenes with a sympathetic and curious eye.

Robert von Sternberg’s modern photos are devoid of people. He focuses his lens instead on infrastructure and urbanscapes. The curated bunch at the museum are mostly meticulously composed night scenes of stores and streets lit with artificial light. Sternberg’s territory was L.A. and So-Cal, and he often patrolled it in the dark for his eerie photos.

“Silvas Oil Company, Ventura, California” is of a gas station that looks like a space station parked in a starless, black space, its lights giving a cold white illumination, its pumps like silent sentries.

Many of his photographs have that neutral gaze of someone looking at something so foreign that it doesn’t register on any emotional level.

In that way, the two photographers’ works are diametrically different. Jones is warm, optimistic, emotional; Sternberg is formal, alien and ominous.

But the museum has packaged them together as Takin’ it to the Streets.

“They rep that street attitude we wanted to show,” says museum director Stuart Chase.

In some minds, the exhibit name might conjure breakdancing on cardboard or Nas’ Illmatic. It’s not that street.

While we’re on the subject of what’s off about the show, the glass covers on the prints reflect everything like a mirror – the lights, the opposite wall, the viewer. It’s distracting and obscuring, especially for clean, dark and stark photographs like Sternberg’s.

But this is compelling stuff, showing a range of approaches to California as a subject. There are also paintings worth checking out, too, including the beguiling Color, Light & Form.

It’s a good time to see what the museum’s deep collection can summon.

TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS is viewable 11am-5pm Thu-Mon at Monterey Museum of Art, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. $10; free/students, military, 18 and under, members; $5/bicyclists with helmet on Thursday. 372-5477, photography.org.