I'm not sure if ZENphoto could do what I want out of the box or maybe with plugins so I thought I would ask its User base if its appropriate for what I want to do.

I am an artist, and I want a gallery for my work. I want the front page to immediately show my most recent work as a grid of images. Instead of albums and sub-albums, I want to organize my work by tagging each image. I then want this front page to have a tag list or tag cloud where the user can click on a tag, and have the selection of images filter down to just images within that tag. For instance, if I have an image of a silver chain bracelet with onyx beads, I want to tag it as "silver" "bracelet" and "onyx" and allow users to click on tags to find it under all of those.

It would be a plus if the user could select more than one tag at a time and have the union or intersection of those tags show up. I.E. select "onyx" and "silver" and have either all images featuring both, or all images featuring either to show up.

If I used albums or categories at all, it would be to separate major groups, like jewelry from paintings. I hope I have portrayed what I am looking for in a gallery. Can ZenPhoto do this?

Generally Zenphoto can do a lot of things especially with custom coding as it is also a framework.

1. recent work -> printLatestImages() in image_album_statistics plugin.
2. Tag cloud -> printAllTagsAs() function
3. You can search for more than one tag via the search form. Boolean operators are possible. You can also create dynamic albums that are based on searches.

I suggest that you work a little with Zenphoto and also read on the user guide. You probably have to make a custom theme or modify existing ones.

Would it be possible to have the search page incorporated, say as an AJAX menu/window, on the front page, and also have the front page update based on the search?

As said a lot of things are possible if you are able to do custom coding which depends on your abilities.

I assume you know the fundamental difference about PHP and Ajax/JS? Loading the search page or any other page via Ajax will not work.