In love with intimacy and more than a little devilish about it, Cecil McDonald, Jr. has turned his lens on himself, his wife and his three daughters as they experience the private moments of everyday life in Chicago’s middle-class South Side. All of McDonald’s luminous color photographs are set-ups, even when his subjects, who should know better, are clueless. Perhaps they indulge him, which would make sense in terms of the dominant feeling of ease that pervades his images, even when there is a bit of tension or, as is ever the case in family life, ennui. Above all a master of fixing significant gestures, McDonald’s most representative image shows him and one of his daughters through the windshield of his Mercury Marquis; her hands are outstretched and she is looking at him with wide eyes and a disbelieving expression on her lips as he stares stoically ahead behind the wheel. McDonald relates that he had just provoked her by asking whether she had kissed her boyfriend yet. (Michael Weinstein)
Through May 31 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior. (312)266-2350.
