Jean Sousa, "Morphology V," 2008, digital print

RECOMMENDED

Distinctive approaches to quiet beauty characterize the six sensitive photographers whom curator Susan Aurinko, director of the late and lamented Flatfile Galleries, has chosen to make her present statement on life. Sarah Hadley’s misty sepia studies of Venetian canals, Morgan Barrie’s small cloudy black-and-white images of landscapes disturbed by human feet or indistinct figures, and Jerry Cargill’s softly focused black-and-white images of earth and sky show the varied possibilities of pictorialist impressionism. Hal Kaye’s sharply etched and silhouetted shot of birds on power lines, Paul Flaggman’s brilliantly illuminated black-and-white takes of accessible urban spaces, and Jean Sousa’s sepia-toned, finely delineated and deeply textured studies of vegetal details seek meditative peace on the opposite path. Each masterful and bearing an individualized sensibility, the six artists taken together are surprisingly complementary. None shoves the others aside; look at Cargill’s image of a wind farm, majestic in the fog, and you will see technology brought to aesthetic heel. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 15 at Mars Gallery, 1139 W. Fulton Market