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Cats are cute. That goes without saying. A lot of photographers are partial to shooting them, another no-brainer. The felines are decidedly cute under Mark Steinmetz’ lens, but only to a point; Steinmetz wanders the scruffy, scrubby environs of Athens, Georgia and snaps black-and-white street portraits of his subjects doing their things with their fabled indifference to lowly humanity. An enormous cat sits regally on top of a car, its mouth hugely agape and its teeth sharp as tacks, yawning monstrously. Read the rest of this entry »

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Back in 2002, John Allen Muhammad, the “Washington Sniper,” captivated the country through his brief months of infamy as he made his way with his young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo on a long and winding road from Washington state, through the Southwest and Deep South, to Maryland and Washington, D.C. gunning down twenty-seven random victims with his rifle. In 2005, photographer Joel W. Fisher retraced Muhammad’s journey, shooting with his camera the depopulated sites of the killer’s deeds. Read the rest of this entry »

Sebrina Fassbender

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In the best conceptually conceived and curated photography show so far this year, gallerists Adam Holtzman and Lucas Zenk have brought together four of the most visually intelligent contemporary feminists, each of whom elucidates and illuminates the condition of being female with a tight and realized strategy. By making a purely photographic disheveled and ramshackle room from scanned straight shots manipulated in the computer, Jessie Seib creates a brilliant visual metaphor of the internal struggle to become an independent self. In her series on New York City prostitutes, Sebrina Fassbender transcends documentary and conventional portraiture by showing her subjects at their low points of despair, yet avoiding even a trace of pity or superiority. Dwelling in popular culture, Sigri Strand stages scenes straight out of film noir that garishly evince the witch-like image of the femme fatale. Convinced that childhood has been overrated in our myths, Jacqueline Langelier gives us a tween sitting at a table full of candy dishes that have overflowed into a full-blown cloying mess. None of these artists knew each other previously, but it is as though they were a juggernaut of a collective. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 28 at Alibi Fine Art, 1966 West Montrose.

David Akiba, "Simple Distances #5" 1980

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Shooting scenario street portraits in a nameless city in black-and-white, David Akiba proceeds to put his prints through a photocopier and then photographs his reproductions, coming up with grainy images that emphasize alienation even when he—only once—captures an embrace. Most characteristic of Akiba’s approach is a diptych recording the same scene of a man walking through a corridor with a shadowy woman in front of him and a man standing behind him in a doorway; in the left panel, the woman resolves into a black silhouette, the walking man is reduced to a mottled decomposing cartoon figure, and the man in the doorway retains a recognizable presence; in the right panel, the woman has become a stain on the wall, the walker is silhouetted in black, and the standing man is a mottled cartoon figure about to fuse with the wall. For Akiba, the perspectives that we take on ourselves and the people around us vary, yet whether we are in high relief or about to disappear, we are always alone. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 31 at Alibi Fine Art, 1966 West Montrose

Joe Johnson, "Ice, Ft. Riley KS," 2002

RECOMMENDED

For its maiden show, Chicago’s newest—and very promising—photography gallery showcases the works of Joel Wellington Fisher, Justin Thomas Leonard and Joe Johnson, all of whom studied at the New England School of Photography and present emotive studies of intimate urban and rural spaces, ranging from Fisher’s gritty and edgy black-and-white abstractions, through Leonard’s dreamy color impressions of Gulf Coast glades, to Johnson’s muted color shots of the Kansas boondocks. If, as social critic Tom Franks has insisted, there is something the matter with Kansas, you would not know it when you look at Johnson’s take of old George, who owns and operates a simple foundry out in the sticks of Wannego, sitting on the hood of his Jaguar with his dog; he has repainted the car garishly in white stars on a blue background, along with other touches, that make it look like a thinly disguised beater. Cultural play is alive and well in Kansas, far from the city-slicker status seekers. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 8 at Alibi Fine Art, 1966 West Montrose

This Valentine’s Day, Chicago artist Aaron Delehanty has come up with an alternative way to celebrate: The Monster Movie Seminar. As part of his current residency at Ravenwood’s Lill Street Art Center, he and friend Matt Fagan of Brainstorm Comics (who Delehanty calls a “monster movie expert”) present this one-off event of all-things monster, from discussions to movie-clip-viewing to costumes. “It’s more campy than sort of scary,” Delehanty admits of the two-hour, BYOB event, which he calls “an alternative to doing anything traditional or romantic on Valentine’s Day.” Delehanty says with this event he’s trying to bring in an event that’s a little more unconventional than what the “conservative” Lill Street is used to. “In a way we’re bringing something bizarre that wouldn’t [normally] happen at an institute like Lill Street,” he says, “where, like, there are moms who come to classes and stuff.” As for the holiday itself, Delehanty doesn’t hold back. “Valentine’s Day is so fake, and people try to pretend it’s real,” he says. “Monster movies, they’re totally fake and people just enjoy it. So it’s a good alternative. I don’t know if this has made my wife very happy, though.” (Tom Lynch)