Bermuda Arts Centre at Dockyard -- Until December 9 If a timeless elegance is any indication of a photograph's success -- and many would agree that it is -- then a large part of the pictures that hang in the Bermuda Arts Centre's latest photo exhibition are winners in every sense.

Indeed, a good many of the photos in the show, which has been designed to showcase "Bermuda and her people,'' are almost indiscernible from a quartet of antique Bermuda prints that have been loaned to the exhibition by Janet Slaughter.

And in both of these sets, Bermuda is revealed as the languid, slightly decaying place that it always has been and might very well always be -- from the turn-of-the-century Front Street that no longer exists to the "overgrown ruins'' and "abandoned house'' of Martha Vaughn's unspeakably gorgeous submissions.

Ms Vaughn, in her work, makes erosion almost seem beautiful, focussing as she does on subjects that are no longer at the height of their physical beauty but haven't quite given it up either.

As in her "Overgrown Ruins, Paget,'' moreover, the play between the natural and the ordered worlds forms a running theme in the show.

With her "Foot of the Lane,'' for instance, Janice Burns captures a foliage-filled, fecund Bermuda, full of roots and ferns and leaves, while Antoine Hunt, a bit less successfully this time, weighs in with the latest contribution to his ongoing "Nature's Children'' series: a large coastal print that is gorgeously hazy from a distance but seems a trifle washed out at close range.

For his part, Andi Giggins, who has two prints on view in the Dockyard show, effectively combines the various dichotomies at work here (the old and the new, the natural and the man-made) in his humourously titled "Queen for a Day,'' a shot of the Queen Elizabeth II at anchor in Great Sound.

At the same time, there are a few artists in the exhibition who have quite obviously abandoned the past to focus their lenses on the here and now exclusively -- most notably Marita Idh-Gauntlett, who has beautifully captured, in her "Bermuda Bikes I and II,'' the proliferation of motor vehicles on this increasingly noisy Island.

For the most part, though, the Dockyard photographers have opted for time less ness over time li ness in their work for "Focus on Bermuda'' (the wonderful local characters in Bruce Barritt's charming if raggedly framed collection of Bermuda faces, Lisa Quinn's elegant Islandscapes).

In this, the photographers seem to be saying, is the real and unbesmirched Bermuda. And in this, they might continue, is the Bermuda that may never be again.

DANNY SINOPOLI