If you see Tim Wride swing into a room like it’s all his, bought and paid for, you’d think he was a football coach on a recruiting trip - one of those big, broadchested guys with a cheerful, can-do personality who makes people believe he can deliver on his dreams.

But if you talk to Tim Wride, you quickly realize he’s a long way from a jock.

For the last six months, Wride has been the Curator of Photography at the Norton Museum of Art, and he’s quickly provided a blast of voltage for that institution. He currently has an exhibit on the musical experience of “Clubs, Joints and Honky Tonks.” His shows tend to center on earthy subjects and they’re hung in a punchy, arhythmic style that doesn’t let the viewer slide away from the art.

It’s all symptomatic of Wride’s rough Zen motto: “If you’re not bringing as much to it as you’re taking from it, you’re missing it.”

Raised in Playa del Rey, a coastal town by the Los Angeles airport, and the son of a furniture maker, Wride was a blue-collar kid who was educated by the Jesuits at Loyola University in Chicago. “The Jesuits will either straighten you out or ostracize you,” says Wride. “The best things about the Jesuits is that they will teach you how to think.”

After college, there was a radical turn - a temp job at TGIFridays turned into a 12-year career. He ended up living in Dallas as the Corporate Beverage Manager, which sounds stupefying, and it must have gradually seemed that way to Wride as well.

He was in his early 30s with a marriage heading south when he realized that his favorite activities had all involved art, people and teaching. And so young Mr. Wride made a left turn, and went back to grad school for a degree in Museum Studies at University of Southern California.

He was like the actor who has yearnings to direct, and, once he tries it has a never-to-be-forgotten WHAM! moment. Although Wride’s natural inclination was to be a medievalist, he got practical once he realized that medieval jobs open up about every ten years. Farewell to the Bayeux Tapestry.

“I was plugged into the modern world,” he says, “and everything that was interesting to me was visual.”

Once again he shifted gears, and honed in on photography. His home town was the perfect place for his enthusiasm. Los Angeles has always had a strong visual tradition borne of great local photographers such as Edward Weston, not to mention Karl Struss, an emigre from New York and protege of Alfred Stieglitz who made the transition to cinematography and won the first cinematography Oscar.

Providentially, Wride’s first job out of USC was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a cultural behemoth with art, sculpture, film, paintings and architecture under its umbrella. Their collection of photographs alone totals around 12,000, including a lot of Edward Weston shots that came from Weston himself.

Photography has been a largely uninvited guest at the banquet of the arts for nearly two centuries now, and for much of that time it has struggled with the ridiculous question of whether or not it is art. “It’s been a battle ever since the Brownie camera,” sighs Wride. “What was the advertising slogan? ‘You push the button and we do the rest.’ That certainly didn’t help. But photography is very little about the machine; it’s about what’s in your head and whether you can translate it into images.”

Wride’s favorite of the shows he curated at LACMA was a showstopper entitled “Cuban Photography After the Revolution.”

Outside of Havana, and Havana’s unacknowledged sister city Miami, Cuba has been a largely unknown country when it comes to art. “It was an interesting time for photography,” Wride says. “There was a heavy graphic style, but with a representation in the revolution. It was Cuban first, then Marxist. As far as the photographers were concerned, the revolution was still alive and they still believed. That’s the primary difference between then and now. For Cuban photographers now, the revolution is like the Vietnam war for young people today; they’re not stakeholders anymore.”

It turns out that the Cuba show was the favorite of a lot of people. “What makes Tim a sterling photo curator is his ability to see beyond fashion,” says Selma Holo, Director of the USC Fisher Museum of Art and a Professor of Art History. “Tim recognizes the new while honoring the old.”

Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Photography Curator at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, lauds Wride for his “fresh eye and a different perspective. When he did the survey on Cuban photography, no one else in the U.S. had really looked at that rich souce of material. He has also presented the works of U.S. photographers who have been working for decades without careful attention to the quality of their work.”

Wilkes Tucker thinks that Wride’s experence in the business world might have drawn him to commercial photographers in a way that more academically minded people might not. “Tim brings people together, invites collaboration, and makes you believe this is going to be fun,” says Tucker. “Tim would say, ‘Have you seen this work? It’s great!’ And over the years I’ve learned to follow through on his suggestions.”

After 14 years at LACMA, Wride was restless. Also, there are 48 curators at LACMA, and it’s not easy to get wall space at a time when shows have to draw attendance in order to justify their existence.

“If there’s a choice between a show of new work and a Man Ray retrospective, what do you think is going to get the call?” is the way Wride puts it. After leaving LACMA, he ran the No Strings Foundation for a couple of years, an organization that dispersed money to emerging photographers. And then he again felt the siren call of the museum world.

There are those in that world who have regarded Wride as an interloper, or, worse, a dilettante because of his corporate background. Others saw him as someone who gets things done. “All of my background is applicable to what I do as a curator,” says Wride. “I relate to my audience as customers. Museums are corporations too, it’s just that most of them are poorly run. I’m used to getting things done in hallways rather than meetings.”

The problems of a museum in Palm Beach have been obvious for the better part of a century. People with remarkable collections live here, but their allegiances, as well as dibs on their collections, lie elsewhere. “We’re the mistress, not the wife,” says Wride.

The Norton’s core art collection is quite strong, but there’s not a lot of bench strength to the rest of the collection. “At LACMA, the Norton was known as a place to sell a show to. Our mandate now is to organize more shows than we buy.”

In order to do that, Wride is calling in markers with photographers. Speaking of the current Honky Tonk show, he says that, “I’d had a music show in my mind for some time, but the only way I could pull it together in three months was to deal with living photographers, not estates. Expediency does come into it.”

Wride has a taste for artists who embody the cutting edge, who often don’t achieve great commercial renown. His to-do list at the Norton includes a major Minor White exhibit in the next two years, as well as the more far-reaching task of molding the photography collection.

“I have an opportunity to shape a collection for the future,” he says. “We have photographs, but there’s no shape to it. It can’t be a collection like there is at LACMA, and it can’t be a collection like there is at MOMA. It has to be about us.”

There is so much to do, but there’s a lot of time in which to do it.

“The great thing about a place like the Norton, which is a mom and pop operation compared to LACMA, is that if you have an idea, you can do it. I don’t have a handle on South Florida yet, but I’m getting there. I’ll let you know when I get there.”