One of the masters of the Chicago school of street photography and photo-journalism, Lee Balterman, along with Nathan Lerner and Art Shay, shaped a gritty, sometimes ironical and sometimes bitterly mordant, yet always human-hearted sensibility drenched in film noir that epitomized the city’s bittersweet take on life a half century ago. Among his many arresting black-and-white images, Balterman’s most captivating is his “Detroit Riots, 1967,” in which we see from behind a tank with its gun pointing straight at a ghetto storefront whose sign reads “Superior Beauty.” The image’s subject is striking and telling enough, but Balterman gives much more; he presents the night scene in deadly chiaroscuro—dappled by pools of deep shadow that attenuate the tank into an ominous black and ghostly death machine, and by patches of glaring light illuminating the storefront. Balterman reports that a moment after he shot the picture the tank blasted Superior Beauty into oblivion. For a kindred view of those times, curator Paul Berlanga provides street shots by Jay King, who brightens up the scene, but not enough to break with the signature Chicago mood that we can still feel when we visit neighborhoods that have not been redeveloped. (Michael Weinstein)
Through July 31 at Stephen Daiter Gallery, 230 W. Superior
