GOLDEN BEACH, Florida - Bruce Weber’s photographic universe - one of sinewy boys in britches, solitary athletes, preppies toting footballs, models and society dames - is free, by design, of meanness, squalor and unsightliness.

It is not unlike the world he has conjured for his current project: an exhibition of portraits of the Haitian community in Miami at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, his first major show in an American museum.

Many of the images first appeared in 2003, in the aftermath of the boat disaster that left hundreds of refugees stranded and held in Miami detention centers. Like his later photographs of Haitians being treated in Miami after the earthquake that destroyed much of Port-au-Prince in January, and in the light of the cholera epidemic devastating the island, they carry an urgent emotional weight.

More than that, they cast Mr. Weber, 64, a professional chronicler of beauty, in the unaccustomed role of activist.

In a way, he said, the label fits. Chatting on his beachfront patio , he said: “Ansel Adams was an activist. He drew your attention to all the great national parks. If you’re any kind of photographer, you are an activist.”

Bearded, burly, his pate swathed in the trademark bandanna he wears even while swimming, an ancient Rolleiflex slung from his neck, he is every inch a self-styled outsider, documenting his world from a position of safety behind the lens.

“As a photographer, you’re always making a fool of yourself,” he said, “telling subjects, ‘Oh, I think you’re so wonderful, can I take your picture?’ That’s a vulnerable thing.”

Discernible in each of his 75 portraits in the Miami show is a wellspring of empathy, the pictures tugging at viewers’ feelings in ways unanticipated by Mr. Weber’s critics. Some have said that in his earlier work, he accentuated his subjects’ beefcake qualities in ways that bring to mind Fascist-era imagery.

Mr. Weber, who has been influenced by American Scene painters like Thomas Hart Benton, bristled. “Just because you sit on the ground and point your camera upward does not mean you want to emulate Leni Riefenstahl,” he said.

Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of the Miami museum, allowed that Mr. Weber’s subjects can at first seem unapproachable. His pictures “have the effect of a sculpture,” she said. “But because you feel you can caress the subject - man, woman or child - the experience of seeing becomes almost tactile. And because you feel you can touch these people, you care about them.”

Until now Americans have seen these people only as “wet, frightened and fighting for their lives,” Mr. Weber said. But he trained his lens on another side of the Haitian community, his view shaped by years of shooting fashion advertising for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch, and stylish editorials for Vogue and Vanity Fair.

“If I hadn’t had the background of taking fashion pictures,” he said, “I wouldn’t have been able to make pictures of these people. I wouldn’t have captured their elegance.”

It took doggedness to record those images, but, then, as he acknowledged, he can be hardheaded.

But the shell he has cultivated can be a cover for the anxieties that plague him - or drive him - each time he makes a picture.

“As a kid,” he said, “I was just as nervous as anybody. I still am.”


By RUTH LA FERLA