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

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

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

Sarah Hadley, "My sister's dresser"

RECOMMENDED

In a tour-de-force of color photographic aesthetics, Sarah Hadley ranges from muted and finely blurred pictorialism, through standard realism in varied light, to sharp graphic precision in her quest to reveal the significance and quiet beauty of the most humble and familiar things. By diversifying her styles of presentation, Hadley insures that we are aware that the way in which we see the world determines our response to it. It is, indeed delightful to contemplate Hadley’s soft and nuanced image depicting a vase in her spattered sink, so reminiscent of a delicate impressionist painting. It is indisputably energizing to behold her bold representation of a blazing campfire at Indian Lake, Ohio. The most telling image in the exhibit is a straight-on still-life—after Vermeer—of a decaying pocked Golden Delicious apple appearing from the shadows on her sister’s dresser. All of Hadley’s photographs stir memories; the ones taken with an unprepossessing approach bring us back directly to what we felt when we glimpsed what she has seen fit to show us again. (Michael Weinstein)

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

RECOMMENDED

One of the most gifted and accomplished street photographers still plying the trade, Susan Aurinko exploits the possibilities of such subjects as multi-layered peeling wall posters and mannequins shot through shop windows to produce intriguing complex images—mainly in traditional black and white—that finely balance the aesthetic power of abstraction with political and cultural meaning. Whereas most wall and window photographers today go for bold color that heightens hype and emotion, Aurinko’s studies are muted and nuanced, making us explore details that escape us in ordinary perception, and impelling us into a meditative mood. Aurinko demonstrates that she can also be thoroughly postmodern with two digital color prints depicting advertising posters of sultry insouciant women that are suffused with reflections from the street. Here she also strikes a balance, this time between her native subtlety and the assertiveness of her medium. Whatever Aurinko does, there is always a play of opposites expressed in layered involvement. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 15 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

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

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