Apr 02
RECOMMENDED
Fascinated by a viral video of an Indonesian kid smoking cigarettes like they were, to say the least, going out of style, Frieke Janssens assembled a bunch of four-through-nine year-old tykes and shot them puffing up a storm on simulated cancer sticks billowing candle smoke, in order to depict the complex meanings and feelings that make up contemporary responses to the pleasure-poison. It is just as well that the subtleties that Janssens desires to depict get lost in the fun. These kids are as cute as any of William Wegman’s dogs were or the ubiquitous kittens that grace, well, whatever kind of card you think you have to send. A little girl blowing smoke rings makes you glad that you opened a pack and indulged back in the day (or even now); smoking really does have something that makes some of us glom on to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 22
Woman with Crow, 2012
RECOMMENDED
One of the most important postmodern photographers, who from the beginning painted on base photographic images to depict mythical and existential themes, Holly Roberts has now reached the point at which her expressive imagination almost fully dominates any traces of realistic representation. Always mordant and cutting in constructing her take on existence, Roberts has achieved a more intense level of focus in her latest series, which sets up complex relations between the crow (a raptor), the coyote (a predator) and the human form—all of which populate the land and folklore of her beloved American Southwest. Read the rest of this entry »
Nov 27
RECOMMENDED
Celebrating her twenty-fifth anniversary as the guiding force of the longest-running Chicago photo gallery, Catherine Edelman has put together 125 images by seventy-seven artists that she has shown over the years in “What I Was Thinking.” Since the gallery has exhibited a variety of genres and styles—and pretty much all of them are included here—the images are neither unified aesthetically nor by theme or approach. The photos are not identified by artist or title on the walls, leading to a sense of being lost. That doesn’t mean that many of the individual images aren’t eminently eye-worthy; they just aren’t linked and must be looked for according to the viewer’s taste and standards. Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 25
Terry Evans, “Slag Processing, Indiana Harbor, August 31,” 2006
RECOMMENDED
Best known for her color aerial photography of the land, often after it has been pillaged, scarred and furrowed by extractive industries or worked over by agriculture, Terry Evans also gets down to ground level for her shots. In this reprise of her work of more than three decades, we see a variety of landscapes, from the Midwest prairie, where she began, to icy Greenland. Yet wherever she goes, Evans’ images always reveal a rough and ragged complexity that defies conventional expectations of pastoral bliss or awesome sublimity. Read the rest of this entry »
Jul 17
Elizabeth Ernst, “Frank and Kitty,” 2012
RECOMMENDED
Among the four intensely serious photographers here, Elizabeth Ernst is the boldest and deepest, plumbing the recesses of psychological distress by shooting images of grotesque doll-like figures that she has sculpted and placed in scenes, and then painting over the prints so that they take on enhanced emotional resonance. In a scenario that is hideous and humorous at the same time, a big buxom fat lady presses her lips against the cheek of a slight man who lets out a Munchian scream. Whose nightmare-fantasy are we witnessing? There is something that we can only call cute in Ernst’s work, which only makes it all the more disturbing. We may remember that Chicago’s very own John Gacy moonlighted as a clown. Read the rest of this entry »
May 08
RECOMMENDED
Covering the last twenty years, Shelby Lee Adams’ black-and-white group and individual portraits of families in Appalachia’s backwoods “hollers” drive home the point that the Third World is alive and maybe not so well deep in the heart of the U.S.A. Whether they are young or old, male or female, or sustaining themselves or barely scraping by, Adams’ subjects seem to be no different than we might have seen their forebears a century ago—dressed pretty much the same (fashion has entirely passed them by), and innocent of contemporary technology except for a ramshackle truck here and there. Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 27
RECOMMENDED
The Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, ruining fish and wildlife stocks, and polluting waterways and beaches. It also had the collateral advantage of creating patterns in a palette of thick iridescent colors—reds, blues and greens—that Daniel Beltra photographed from high above in an airplane. In these images, the waters resemble thick daubs of paint dotted with miniature clean-up boats and the famous busted drilling platform sits in a miasma of greens, like a delicate little toy. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 17
RECOMMENDED
From 2005 through the present, Viktoria Sorochinski has been photographing the relation between Anna and her daughter Eve, not as a documentary of the vicissitudes of their bond, but through Sorochinski’s imagination of the many forms it might take in her staged and directorial color scenario shots. What Sorochinski’s images lose in spontaneity and the suppleness of life, they make up for in their sharply delineated moods and meanings. Read the rest of this entry »
Nov 08
untitled, 2007
RECOMMENDED
If you’re in the mood for a full-strength shot of grotesquerie, glom on to Gary Briechle’s black-and-white Collodion portraits of Maine rednecks (they’ll beat the southern gents and belles any time for their unstudied naivete and unadulterated rawness). Ralph Meatyard’s backwoods surrealism and Diane Arbus’ freakish individualism fuse in Briechle’s studies of people who let their emotions hang out because they don’t know how to front, even if they’ve been posed. Read the rest of this entry »
Sep 13
RECOMMENDED
Love is a many-splendored thing, but only in photography can love attain the zenith of self-referential purity and perfection, albeit in a series of images that could never be tokens of real life. Through the magic of the computer, Kelli Connell shoots the same female model, in the twilight of youth, playing the roles of two friends/lovers; mixes up the images digitally; and composes them in seamless color scenarios depicting moments of intimacy and distance in the subjects’ relationship—the quintessence of narcissism. Read the rest of this entry »
