ILLUMINATIONS: A BESTIARY Rosamond Wolff Purcell at the Field Museum of Natural History FORMALDEHYDE, ETC. Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig, and Jane Calvin at Catherine Edelman Gallery Dead animals are pretty neat. In each of her two current exhibitions, one at the Field Museum and the other at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, […]
Author Archives: Peter Friederici
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Out of Town: a winter walk through the Volo Bog
There is a small rise on the boundary of Lake and McHenry counties that was once the shore of a lake. On a winter’s day it overlooks a large expanse of dry cattails, their brown flower heads still disintegrating into the white fluff that bears the plants’ seeds on the wind. Beyond the cattails a […]
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Rockwell on a Plate
In a democracy, art belongs to the people. –Norman Rockwell A couple of Sundays ago, Myrtle Sudbrink of Hartland, Wisconsin, fulfilling a long-held desire, spent $110 to purchase a ten-year-old plate decorated with a Norman Rockwell painting of a cobbler. She made the transaction at the Bradford Exchange in northwest suburban Niles in the company […]
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Group Efforts: a day in our life
They meet every Friday evening at 8 PM as they have done for 93 years now, in a modest suite of rooms with green linoleum floors on the fifth floor of an old South Loop office building. The members of the Fort Dearborn-Chicago Camera Club gather to discuss photographic techniques, to plan outings together, to […]
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Significant Moments
WAR & WEDDINGS: PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN GROSS at the Public Library Cultural Center NO EASY ROSES: A LOOK AT THE LIVES OF CITY TEENAGERS Olive Pierce at the Field Museum Most people don’t spend much time looking at art photography, the kind displayed in galleries or glossy coffee-table books. What we look at more are […]
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Photo Copy: the remote edges and unknown corners of O’Hare
At first glance, “O’Hare–Airport on the Prairie: Photographs by Robert Burley” is an unsurprising exhibition. We recognize in big, sumptuous Ektacolor prints the crowded terminal buildings, the waiting passengers, the traffic jams–the sort of frustrating airport tableaux we’ve all had parts in. Then jets taxiing, accelerating down a runway, or landing just beyond patches of […]
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Beware of the grass: Oak Park grapples with the lawn-chemicals problem
Less than a block from her Oak Park apartment, Mills Park was a pleasant and convenient place for Donna Jawor to walk her 12-year-old Yorkshire terrier each day. It wasn’t until she and Rocky were back home last September 15, a rainy day, that she noticed the dog was behaving strangely. “He was licking his […]
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Arid America
DESERT CANTOS Richard Misrach at the Art Institute GATES OF EDEN: AMERICANS AND THE LAND Peter Hales at the Public Library Cultural Center Richard Misrach prides himself on not photographing the classic landmarks of the American west. Death Valley and the Grand Canyon, he says, are nice, but not representative. And they are not represented […]
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Chicago Fun Times: ghosts on the water
You see them going out every fair day from May into October, the excursion boats that take sightseers out for a two-hour-long view of the lakefront and skyline. When they return, the visitors can recite capsule histories of the John Hancock, Navy Pier, the reversing of the Chicago River. But when Richard T. Crowe takes […]
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Illinois Trivia
On Thursday, May 12, it is almost painfully bright in front of the State of Illinois Center at the kickoff ceremony for Illinois Tourism Week. Once in a while, a breeze starts a string of balloons or a flag swinging lazily. There has already been a balloon launch, accompanied by the loud strains of “Illinois, […]
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Man vs. Land
LANDSCAPES FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD, PHOTOGRAPHS 1972-1987 Frank Gohlke ANCIENT STONES, NEW ENGLAND LANDSCAPES, AND RECENT WORK FROM FRANCE Paul Caponigro PIONEERING MATTAWA Joseph Bartscherer at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Civilization, scholars tell us, began when mankind turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture; a study of man’s relations with the landscape […]
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Tour de France
The French Travel Showcase came to town on Saint Patrick’s Day, not an ideal day for concentrating on things French: somehow the peculiar poisonous color of the river kept coming to mind, and even some of the most avid Gallophiles–the kind who were wont to burst out practically unsolicited, “Oh, I just love France”–were wearing […]
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On Exhibit: Nan Goldin’s love junkies
Nan Goldin begins her recent book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, with a sort of photo familiar to us all: the first page shows the photographer giving her boyfriend a cheery hug on the occasion of her birthday, with a caption giving the date and place. The last image depicts, rather more grimly, two painted […]