At a gallery in southwest Atlanta, charming portraits of girlhood

Bottom line: Los Angeles photographer Aline Smithson offers a fresh and charming portrait of girlhood in “Spring Fever.”

Arnika Dawkins Gallery on Cascade Road in southwest Atlanta is probably not what most people expect when they envision an art gallery. The gallery occupies a small, neatly landscaped home with butter yellow siding — mystifyingly free of signage — tucked onto a residential street next to ranch homes and modest bungalows.

But looks can be deceiving: Beneath the plain suburban facade is a hidden art speakeasy where you don’t need a password to get in. Though its exterior gives no indication of the commercial art gallery inside, the living room and bedroom walls of this small home are devoted to African-American photography, the focus of its eponymous owner Arnika Dawkins.

The gallery’s current show is as bright and cheery as the pink and white azaleas blooming in the front yard. The affordable, engaging work of Los Angeles photographer Aline Smithson is displayed most prominently alongside an array of black and white images by renowned photographer Builder Levy, which, in this selection of works, depict young children at play and in repose in far-flung documentary photography from Mongolia to Cuba to the streets of Brooklyn and rural West Virginia.

Smithson’s images are from a series called “Spring Fever” focused on the beguiling peaches-and-cream wholesomeness of little girls. The series subtly upends the bookend representation of young girls in American visual culture: as precocious vixens in training in the media and as equally precocious beauties in the fine art photography of the likes of Sally Mann, Mona Kuhn and Jock Sturges. What is often lacking from such portraits is the utterly enchanting quality of unvarnished innocence seen in Smithson’s images. Smithson’s photographs capture young girls wearing cheerful, happy grins, in the time before their inevitable recognition of the societal expectations for how girls should look and behave. They are children playing dress-up in their mothers’ too-big high heels and ropes of pearls dangling down to their knees, unaware of the expectations of womanhood those clothes entail. Smithson photographs her subjects at age 7, an age she has chosen as marking a transition between that enchanted respite of childhood and the budding womanhood on the horizon.

For her portraits Smithson dresses the girls in the bright, cheery, showy garments of a previous era. Topping their small heads like fondant- and flower-covered wedding cakes are colorful 1950s-era hats festooned with daisies, pansies, plastic cherries and filmy veils. In “Quincy,” a girl with bright blue eyes that echo the wallpaper behind her nearly drowns beneath an enormous yellow-bow ornamented straw hat. The little girls wear coordinating costume jewelry in soft pastel hues. There is something exceedingly sweet and confectionary in that combination of vintage hats, fussy, “fancy” jewelry and floral wallpaper backdrops. Charm and a slightly comical tone define these images of young girls decked out in the trappings of little old ladies on their way to church. But despite their rosy appeal, there is a degree of complexity beneath the surface of the images. In the collision of fresh-faced girlhood and the costume of grown women lies an interesting contradiction.

Smithson’s photographs may be uncannily familiar for local photography fans, as it echos the work of Atlanta-based artist Angela West, whose “Sweet Sixteen” series portrays teenage girls in dress-up prom gowns against floral wallpaper backdrops.

Like West, Smithson is interested in the collision between expectations of femininity and the reality. West also uses the imagery of flowers in her backdrops as symbols of unsullied, blooming, delicate femininity and actual girls, who are far from inert, impassive symbols.

There is something poignant in the unspoken message behind the images of adult women adopting a fussy, showy costume of blooming femininity, and the little girls who instead embody that fresh, expectant possibility.