RECOMMENDED

One of the legions of Chicago photographers who testify to their love for their sweet home’s cityscape by shooting on the streets in their own distinctive styles, Joe Koecher distinguishes himself from the others by his split personality that makes him a visual Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Look at Koecher’s clear and sometimes garishly illuminate color and black-and-white images that he has printed on canvas, and you are in the comfortably familiar aesthetic of celebration, served up with the panache of angle shots—like a breathtaking view of steel-and-glass skyscraper caught through the spaces opened up in the Picasso sculpture—and striking effects like the downtown wreathed in a billowing fog captured from Olympian heights. Read the rest of this entry »

"Honor Among 5," 1987/2011

RECOMMENDED

A long-time “spectator of public sexuality,” Doug Ischar was in his prime and in his element in the hey-day of the untrammeled breakout by gays from the closet and into the beaches and bars. In 1987, Ischar found his perfect scene: San Francisco’s leather bar, the Eagle, in the thick of its chock-full-of-patrons “beer busts,” at which erotic moves were communal and intimate at the same time, evincing the trust and confidence of social, cultural and personal revolution. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Nowhere in the world is more socially complicated than Lebanon, with its dizzying array of religions and sects, and nowhere is more cosmopolitan than its capital Beirut, where all of them meet, mingle, fight and fraternize. Conflict photographer Jamal Saidi knows his native city intimately and has documented its troubled vicissitudes and its resilience for more than three decades in edgy, bold and energy-laden black-and-white and color shots. Contrast is the name of Saidi’s game; he wants to show, in this retrospective, the devastation and oppression that Beirut suffered in the late twentieth century as a result of civil war instigated by external powers, and its rebirth as the jewel and entrepot of the Middle East after the millennium. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Shooting in black and white with a 35mm camera, John Sevigny—although he has been producing his documentaries and poetic studies of Mexico and Mexicans in the twenty-first century—is a throwback to the street photographers of seventy or more years ago in both style and subject. If one were to go by Sevigny’s images of a beaming accordion player in a sombrero, down-and-out bar girls in Guadalajara, coils of rough rope, and bedraggled migrants making their way from Central America to the United States, one would have no idea of the cosmopolitan Mexico of today, with its vibrant middle class, billionaires, drug lords and a dizzying array of sub-cultures; or of the changes in photography that have accompanied globalization everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In the heaven on earth of postmodern play, Anthea Behm is the games’ mistress, this time consummating a high-low (don’t ask, do tell) unholy liaison between stodgy elitist cultural theorist Theodor Adorno and sportive young adolescent-minded Ferris Bueller, played by a number of male and female performers wandering through the Art Institute spouting texts from the theorist’s impenetrable aesthetics and the boy wonder’s screenplay, in succession in an endless forward-backward loop without beginning and end. Don’t worry if you aren’t a graduate student in semiotics; Behm has made the audio loud and indistinct, leaving the viewer-listener to pick out words and phrases like “socialism” and “who gives a cultural crap?” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Taking the peony—from budding through blossoming to wilting away—as a metaphor for our transient and fleeting everyday experiences, Jean Sousa’s thirteen digital and digitally altered color photographs of the life-cycle of the flower move between soft and atmospheric abstractions, and harsh and densely, deeply detailed studies. The two directions are not random; the suggestive abstractions dominate the phases of growth and maturity, and the enhanced representational shots are concentrated in the period of decline and death. In Sousa’s vision, the richly delineated impressions of the end of life—withering yet intensely colored—blow away the vagueness of youth. At the finale, dead yellow petals that still hang on form a carpet over the scattered remaining pink and white ones, symbolizing past vitality that carries over into the first movement of the next visual symphony. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 30 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln.

RECOMMENDED

In ten color fantasy scenario photo-works, Sabina Cosic illustrates the story of Mary Mae and her brother Chaos—a tale of sibling rivalry that puts Cain and Abel to shame for its utter descent into horrifying absolute evil, which Cosic relates in texts below each image in small print. Suffice it to say that Mary Mae suffers from the worst case of nihilistic existentialist envy this side of Satan: she resents Chaos because she has no heart and he has a good one; in consequence, she tries to kill him in the most hideous ways—the ones we find described in books on contemporary child abuse. We can see it all in the photo-works, which Cosic composes in the computer out of photographs and her digital tweaking, coming up with ghoulish scenes out of a fairy-tale book that would be sure to frighten any child to death, and might do the same for some adults if they looked at them long enough. With Cosic, the bad seed has blossomed into the flower of evil. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 2 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln

Robert Blanchon's “Untitled (aroma/1981),” and “Untitled (drawing horse)”

By Jason Foumberg

In 1998, one year before he died at age 33 of AIDS in Chicago, the artist Robert Blanchon created “Untitled (drawing horse),” a replica of the type of benches that students use in a drawing class, but made entirely of glass panes. Blanchon probably enjoyed the fact that, in order to use the bench properly, an artist had to keep their legs spread wide open in front of their art, like a perpetual flirtation. Indeed, sex and the body were the subjects of much of Blanchon’s art, but as “Untitled (drawing horse)” sits today in Golden gallery, on loan from the Blanchon Estate, the glass bench is present like a ghost, its sitter palpably absent.

Here, the drawing horse faces fifty-five ad clippings from gay sex magazines, pinned to a wall. There are not ads for escorts or dates but from companies selling poppers (a sex drug), dick cream, cock rings, a chest-hair wig and other sexual enhancements—even one from the Tom of Finland studio where men could commission portraits. This collection of clippings is another Blanchon artwork, “Untitled (aroma/1981),” from 1995. (The “1981” in the artwork’s title references the year that HIV first started to reveal itself.) In addition to this collection being an archive of back-page gay graphic design and desire in a pre-AIDS era, it is also a dynamic object. Originally, Blanchon photographed and re-printed these clippings, but he did not complete the crucial final step in the hand-developing process, which is to dip the reproductions in a fixative bath. Therefore, the reproductions, once hung in a gallery, are intended to fade and disappear rather quickly and perceptibly during their exhibition. Likely the original magazines would fade anyway, being printed on cheap paper or newsprint, but Blanchon was aiding their demise. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Belgian photographer Claude Andreini’s black-and-white small-format studies of the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Terezin are meant to renew memories of the Holocaust, yet—more than anything—they evoke the quietude and loneliness of derelict institutional spaces of any kind that, in this case, have been kept intact frozen in time, stripped and bare. Often shot at dusk or in the dead of night, always shadowed and often dimmed, and usually empty but sometimes including a solitary walker, Andreini’s images are reposeful and contemplative, not horrifying, even when they depict guard towers. We need to know what happened at these sites for Andreini’s photographs to incite remembrance; if we do not, we are moved to think of life that has departed, leaving its shell behind, rather than death. A sense of peace permeates Andreini’s images—the peace that inheres underneath and that surrounds human desires and deeds, for good or ill. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 3 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln

RECOMMENDED

One of the most versatile, productive and consistent conceptual photographers on today’s scene, Ryan Zoghlin receives a stunning mid-career retrospective in this exquisite show curated by Susan Aurinko. Ceaselessly trying out different kinds of cameras, film, and printing processes—old and new—Zoghlin always adapts technique to meaning, delivering distinctive integral images in each of the nine diverse series, with forty-three images on display. At one extreme of his sensibility, Zoghlin offers up alluring and dynamic infrared images (“aerotones”) of the vapor trails at air shows that explode the photographic abstraction into bursts of patterned energy. At another pole, Zoghlin’s constructed industrial landscapes (“Unnatural Resources”) taken with high-speed 35mm black-and-white film present one of the most ominous renditions of a negative utopia that is nonetheless spiked with humor—as when glass jars belching smoke create a white-hot fog worthy of a chemical disaster. Taken together, the components of the exhibition complement and enhance one another by contrast effects, giving viewers the opportunity to sample the varieties of visual intelligence. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 22 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln