Knowing all this, she admits that maybe — just maybe — she set the bar a bit high for herself.

"It's like, where do you go from there?"

If you're Stolfa, apparently you go to Yale.

A longtime resident of Philadelphia (and former keyboardist in The Delta 72), she packed up her bags at the end of summer and headed north to New Haven. The graduate program, an intensive two-year MFA study in photography, was her first choice and a competitive one; it admits only nine students per year. When we caught up with her by phone last Wednesday night, Stolfa was on a late break from orientation.

"I'm not going to worry about what's happening outside of here," she said. "I need to concentrate on my two years here."

Which is why the work that got her to Yale is being retired after a final exhibition at Gallery 339; the show opens tonight and runs through Nov. 11.

The deadpan faces of The Regulars have made their way into a handful of group shows at the Woodmere Art Museum and the Perkins Center for the Arts in Morristown, N.J., since winning the Times contest in June 2004. The series was shown in its entirety at Drexel's Pearlstein Gallery in late 2004, but Stolfa considers this her first "real" solo showing of the work. Pearlstein was a university gallery, she says, not a commercial one, and the body of work wasn't as mature back then.

THE USUAL: Georgia Russell, Jesse Schabel and Ryan Smith, drinking at McGlinchey's.

"I'm more sure-footed in the project, in where it is now," she said. "Which is why it's hard to say this is the final showing."

The series, she recalls, was borne out of a photographic block in between her studies at Drexel and her work at McGlinchey's. At a loss, she began to keep her Hasselblad with her behind the bar. A test run one night exhausted five rolls of film and produced Robert Fleeger — a striking shot of a stern, Ben Affleck-looking guy in a tie, sweater and suit coat, nursing a stout, smoking a cigarette — one of the series' most recognized images.

That shot cemented the project and motivated her to keep chiseling away at it. Using a flash rigged with a cardboard diffuser to chase away the bar's dank atmosphere, she kept the images as non-posed as possible, capturing instead the subjects' reaction to a sudden camera in their faces. The composition is consistent from image to image — the sitter is always in the center of the frame, bar in front, close-cropped to get only the absolute necessary amount of environmental detail with little background distraction. Stolfa says it would have been easy enough to photograph a variety of scenes and scenarios, pictures of people at tables pounding shots, that kind of stuff. But the uniformity in composition lends the images an air of distinction, elevates them.

Her lone criterion in choosing subjects was their lack of attachments; Stolfa shot only people who came into McGlinchey's by themselves.

"To me, I was always interested in why people come into bars alone. I have a feeling why," she chuckles. "They're looking for a connection, for people to listen to them, for a community."

But where the series is often praised as an encapsulation of alcoholic loneliness, its images are a great deal more inscrutable than that. Georgia Russell wears a playful smirk and a provocative outfit; her wineglass is empty. Arpson Bravos has a dignified gaze as he reads a newspaper; his wineglass is full. Jesse Schabel seems self-conscious with the camera so close and neurotically averts her gaze to the side; Monica Pace begrudgingly sits, but seems like she'd rather read her book. This isn't overarching unhappiness. It's not any singular emotion as much as the assortment of emotions one might find in any crowd.

For Stolfa, The Regulars crowd was one she got to know well over nine years serving them drinks; she says the trust and comfort level made the series what it is.

"I think if I had just walked into a bar I had no connection with, it would have been a totally different set of pictures."

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)