Gary Kolb’s cool and luminous black-and-white photographs of Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior and the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois radiate a sense of peace and stillness that often overtakes the wanderer in placid shaded sylvan bowers. Although some of Kolb’s twenty-six shots are panoramic, most of them hone in on details such as rock formations, twisted tree limbs, pools of water and thickets of leaves, all of which he presents elegantly composed and finely printed, inviting extended contemplation. Kolb’s unwavering meditative sensibility insures that his images evoke the same quiet emotional response regardless of their various subjects—he offers a photographic idyll that becomes ever more removed from reality the longer we let it work on us, an effect of the triumph of photographic values over the illusion of direct perception. (Michael Weinstein)
Through August 10 at Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan. (312)915-7600 .
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