Review: Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann/Museum of Contemporary Photography

RECOMMENDED

A foreclosed home is not a pretty sight after its owners have been dispossessed. At least that is the message of Chicago-based German photographers Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann who have undertaken the task of shooting the interiors of scores of houses that have gone on the block with deadpan straight-on documentary eyes. Geissler and Sann show us gutted rooms and hallways in which there is often some trace of lives left behind, like the remains of a photo-collage of fashion models on a bare wall above an electric plug stuck into a wall socket from which the cord has been severed. As a result of their uncompromising documentary approach, Geissler and Sann evoke neither nostalgia nor a sense of beauty, but simply a realization of what the wear and tear of life do to home sweet home, once the façade is stripped away and we are left with the clump of insulation that has worked its way through a hole in the ceiling. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

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