Having had a falling out with the board of the Chicago Photography Center, which he founded, photography teacher and community activist Richard Stromberg inaugurates his new space and community endeavor with a show bringing together eight of his present and former students from the Center and the defunct Jane Addams Center, where he practiced and honed his brand of cooperative learning as the basis for individual growth for thirty-three years. Among the veterans, Rick Katz stands out for his brilliant color abstractions of details of the Antelope Canyon outside Page, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. Balancing light and composition with exquisite power, Katz penetrates into the canyon’s recesses, capturing streaks and pools of light that pour through openings in the ceiling and manifest as displays of fiery reds, yellows and whites that illuminate the richly textured red-brown walls and floors. Katz’s masterwork is “High Noon” in which the multihued light streaming through a passageway takes the shape of a blazing lantern defined by encircling walls, their grooves and ridges swirling in place. In Katz’s aesthetic, wild excitement is disciplined by complex form, precipitating the most intense beauty. (Michael Weinstein)
