Marvin Newman and Yasuhiro Ishimoto became friends while studying at Chicago’s fabled Institute of Design, and brought the late-Modernist aesthetic that they were taught there to its street-photographic limits. In this comprehensive show–with works mainly from the 1950s–featuring fifty-one of Newman’s gritty film noirish Chicago shots and forty-three of Ishimoto’s brighter and wittier efforts, along with some of his later formal Zen-like studies, we are drawn back to a time in which fashion and cultural criticism were less important to photographers than telling expressive gestures. From the same root of a keen trained eye for significant detail grow Ishimoto’s amusing studies of the backsides of bathers standing at the refreshment shacks on the lake shore, and Newman’s take of the shoes of men milling around on a wood floor littered with trading slips. (Michael Weinstein)
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