RECOMMENDED Girls at the awkward age of adolescence come at us from every side in this show of forty-eight mostly color images by eleven contemporary photographers who give us collectively a decidedly unromantic take on their all-too-real subjects. Male voyeurs have nothing to gain here—ten of the artists are women, and they see the teens as a mother would, in all their uncertainty and, ultimately, psychological vulnerability; there is precious little self-possession here, much less vamping. The mood of the show is captured most exquisitely by Melissa Pinney’s “Bar Mitzvah Dance,” in which we see girls attempting to look blasé in the arms of clueless boys half their size. A similar poignancy pervades the most powerful works here—Rineke Djikstra’s large-format color portraits of girls in bathing suits standing on shorelines adopting disconcertingly defensive attitudes. (Michael Weinstein) Through February 24 at Art Institute of Chicago
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