San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts is nestled deep within the complex of 18 museums and several theaters at the heart of the city's 1400-acre Balboa Park, surrounded by the world-class San Diego Zoo, a golf course and other public facilities. In fact, it's situated so deeply within this cultural and recreational maze that one might easily pass by, unaware of the proximity of what is one of the country's most engaging mid-sized cultural institutions, and one of the finest devoted to photography. The physical remoteness of MoPA, as it is called, is deceptive. In an era when some museums have shied away from presenting controversial work, MoPA regularly mounts exhibitions bound to rustle feathers. Just as impressively, at a time when non-profit organizations of all sizes have had to downsize, MoPA is in the midst of a massive fundraising campaign that will allow the museum to quadruple its space and launch a regular film program in 1999. Despite the recent demise of the San Diego Symphony, the trend in San Diego's cultural community has been toward growth. For example, in 1993, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art opened a permanent downtown branch and closed its La Jolla flagship for a massive renovation completed in 1996. On a smaller scale, the non-profit organization Sushi Performance and Visual Art also put programming on a temporary hiatus to settle into new quarters, launching its first full season of dance and performance art this fall. So while MoPA is not alone in its efforts to enhance the status of San Diego's cultural institutions, its project is inarguably ambitious. Starting with a $330,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the museum has, at this writing, succeeded in raising well over half of the renovation budget of $4 million, with a year and a half to go before completion. The project will cost about four times the museum's annual operating budget, half of which is derived from membership, admission and bookstore sales; donations comprise the other half. For director Arthur Ollman, a photographer-cum-administrator of considerable vision and charisma, expansion is less a nail-biting gamble than a well-considered inevitability: We have no choice . . . If you're not growing, you're shrinking, he told me. Ollman, with prior experiences as co-founder and chair of the board of San Francisco Camerawork, joined the museum as both director and curator in 1982, when the organization then known as the Center for Photographic Arts successfully petitioned the city of San Diego for a permanent space. This consortium of photographers and supporters had organized ad hoc exhibitions at various galleries and community centers since 1972; as the new resident of 7000 square feet in the reconstructed Casa de Balboa, the group changed its name to recognize its new status, and opened as the Museum of Photographic Arts in May 1983 with a two-person show of work by Eugene Smith and Bern Schwartz. The museum invited the architect responsible for the current space, David Raphael Singer, to handle the expansion project as a continuation of his original design for MoPA, now on a grander scale. When the neighboring San Diego Sports Museum Hall of Champions relocates next year, MoPA will take over its spacious rotunda and street-level access to the pedestrian boulevard known as El Prado. Upon completion, MoPA's current galleries will remain intact, and new galleries will be added, along with a video alcove, a 250-seat theater and an enlarged bookstore. With the capacity to engage in multiple exhibition, screening and educational activities simultaneously, the museum expects to stimulate attendance beyond the current 50,000 per year, a figure which has held steady in recent years. Behind the scenes, the plan calls for improved office, storage and classroom facilities, to accommodate the steadily growing permanent collection and expanding educational programs, which currently include an active and popular lecture series that has in recent years featured as many as two dozen events per year. …