Richard Katz

RECOMMENDED

Having had a falling out with the board of the Chicago Photography Center, which he founded, photography teacher and community activist Richard Stromberg inaugurates his new space and community endeavor with a show bringing together eight of his present and former students from the Center and the defunct Jane Addams Center, where he practiced and honed his brand of cooperative learning as the basis for individual growth for thirty-three years. Among the veterans, Rick Katz stands out for his brilliant color abstractions of details of the Antelope Canyon outside Page, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. Balancing light and composition with exquisite power, Katz penetrates into the canyon’s recesses, capturing streaks and pools of light that pour through openings in the ceiling and manifest as displays of fiery reds, yellows and whites that illuminate the richly textured red-brown walls and floors. Katz’s masterwork is “High Noon” in which the multihued light streaming through a passageway takes the shape of a blazing lantern defined by encircling walls, their grooves and ridges swirling in place. In Katz’s aesthetic, wild excitement is disciplined by complex form, precipitating the most intense beauty. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 31 at 4001 N. Ravenswood

RECOMMENDED

In a project of photographic outreach, the Center offers works by eight artists who are clients of social service agencies and are passionate about what the camera can do. Luminous beauty in bright colors, often accompanied by inspirational text, dominate the images here, but a more somber and meditative note is struck by Diane’s muted color studies of Chicago in winter—captured by song titles—that emphasize solitude and sometimes abandonment. In “Lonely (Akon),” we see the North Pond restaurant at the Lincoln Park lagoon backgrounded by steel-and-glass high rises through a finely spun veil of snowflakes. In an untitled shot, Diane presents a forlorn park bench shot from behind surrounded by mounds and swathes of snow, and a pile of dead leaves. In all her works, Diane reminds us of the times when we were out alone and quietly came upon scenes that elicit the pathos of a wanderer. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 21 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

Eric Ciccarelli

RECOMMENDED

From Sean O’Connor’s peaceful yet whirling studies of dancers in motion to Richard Johnson’s dynamic images capturing ragged geometries; from Don Kepler’s picture-book photos of blooming nature, to Mike Davern’s ramshackle rural scenes; and from Tom Snow’s lively documentary of Native American heritage celebrations, to Eric Ciccarelli’s impressions of decayed urban spaces and cultural detritus, the young photographers here—shooting mostly in color—run the gamut of straight sensibilities. For his relentless dedication to hardcore raunchiness Cicccarelli steals the show with his gritty black-and-white takes of a busted bicycle collapsed in filthy rubble and of discarded mattresses and trash of uncertain origin strewn on broken-up pavement. Ciccarelli announces where he stands in his banner color shot of a ripped wall poster—surrounded by dense gang graffiti—in which a young boy stares at us dumbfoundedly; across his chest have been affixed the words: NO FUTURE. It is a needed sorbet from sentimentality. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 10 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

RECOMMENDED

The Center’s winter exhibit follows tradition by showcasing seven young photographers working in diverse modernist genres, including abstraction, street shooting, nature studies, ambient social photography and the documentary in black and white and color. For sheer conceptual precision, creative imagination, passion and technical skill, Nathalie Marroquin steals the show with her black-and-white series, “Life in the 1940s,” in which she set herself up in a tacky vintage flat and proceeded to make herself the star in a drama of everyday domesticity with the aim of showing what she had learned from a study of an era of war on the domestic front–the refusal to “give up” in the face of adversity. A sense of meditative loneliness suffuses Marroquin’s sensitive shadowed images, as we see her cleaning a glass cabinet with a feather duster or cranking a mechanical egg beater in a mixing bowl. Marroquin confesses that she gets a “rush” when she performs these humble tasks before the camera, and we will experience the same when we watch her suspended in a time she never knew. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 30 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

RECOMMENDED

Three compelling photographic portraitists—each with a distinctive signature style—dominate the Center’s fall show. Amber Ricciardi’s cheeky and almost-over-the-top approach captures her subjects at ordinary odd moments when their expressions are exaggerated, like putting on makeup. Luca Angeli is relaxed and warm-hearted, portraying his Argentine subjects at ease and at pleasure, adding some hedonism to the family-of-man tradition. Lucian Cioata makes everyone a tough guy, each in his or her own way, with a credibility that is nearly convincing; he has gotten his subjects to reduce to their bare minimum their irony about his experiment. In his point of tangency with Ricciardi, Cioata serves up a dude leaning provocatively against a parking meter and sporting a t-shirt on which is written: “let’s hug it out bitch.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 31 at Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln, (773)549-1631.

RECOMMENDED

The summer installment of the Center’s ongoing series of group photography shows contains, as usual, technically proficient work in a wide range of modernist genres. Among the seven artists represented, Juan Alvarez stands out for his sensitive and revealing color studies of intimate details with an accent on hands and feet, alerting us to sights that we pass over in the ordinary course of affairs. In “Rockband,” Alvarez gives us a beautifully composed glowing orange-hued image in which a foot descends on the maze of pedals and wires that are essential to producing the special effects of guitar gods, proving beyond a doubt that rock music is a marriage of man and mechanism—Alvarez does not let us decide which one is the dominant partner in this affair. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 31 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln, (773)549-1631.

RECOMMENDED

From Keith Skutt’s finely spun lapidary color landscapes to Eric Holubow’s shadowed color studies of derelict and decayed spaces, the eleven talented young photographers here reveal that beauty comes in a multitude of forms and is brought forth by the artist’s special temperament. For the grace and excitement of the active body, look at Stephanie Maj’s whirling and swirling cyclists, all of them—pros, kids and the handicapped—exulting in the union of muscle and machine. Anne-Marie Sesti is also intrigued with all bicycles great and small, but she likes them at rest, as when she shows us a green mountain bike lying forlornly on top of a huge mottled boulder in an Iowa field at dawn, under a pale fading moon in a subtly hued gray sky. Sesti also takes the prize for irony with her shot of a portly and smiling Bill Bernhard clutching a wad of bills in his fist as he sits in front of his pink “Mr. Pork Chop” bus, around which are strewn racing bikes that have been abandoned temporarily to make way for gut stuffing. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 30 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln, (773)549-1631.