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)
The Roots of Pride: A Review of Jerry Pritikin at The Chicago Center for Photojournalism The show “When Then Was Now” gives a glimpse of early LGBTQ+ life in San Francisco—Harvey Milk became mayor and gay activism was gaining momentum. Pritikin, a legend of reportage, takes us back to a time before AIDS reared its ugly head and shows us how the movement looked all those decades ago.
Fleeing Desperation: A Review of Ada Trillo at Chicago Center for Photojournalism In this heartbreaking yet visually beautiful exhibition, Ada Trillo implicates herself within her subjects to shine a light on both the hope and the hopelessness of their lives. If you are not moved by these images, surely your heart is made of stone.
Home Is Where the Family Is: A Review of Chicago Chiquito at Bridgeport Art Center This small but significant exhibition shows the history of Chicago Chiquito, or little Chicago, the nickname given to La Hacienda, a small town in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. Its families have migrated north to find work for over one hundred years.
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