Photography Exhibition: The Art Institute of Chicago - Chicago Cabinet: Views from the Street

The Art Institute of Chicago, regularly has extraordinary photographic exhibitions. This exhibition, Chicago Cabinet: Views from the Street, features seven artists who have taken inspiration from the city's buildings, pedestrians, and vivid street life. Walker Evans, best known for his Depression-era images of the American south is one of the featured photographers.

This exhibition will run through January 17, 2011

The second exhibition in the Cabinet series, Views from the Street, features seven artists who have taken inspiration from the city's buildings, pedestrians, and vivid street life. Walker Evans, best known for his Depression-era images of the American south, photographed Chicago in 1946 for Fortune magazine, looking at shoppers, burlesque signs, and tumbling-down brownstones. Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Ray K. Metzker, both students of Harry Callahan’s at the city’s legendary Institute of Design (ID), found photographic material in children playing on south side streets and in the light and shadows within the physical boundaries of the Loop. Arthur Siegel, who helped found the ID’s photography program, saw Freudian themes of the self in the colors and shoppers of State Street in the 1950s. And in the 1970s, photographers as diverse as David Plowden, Luis Medina, and Gary Stochl took their cameras to the streets, exploring the urban and industrial landscape, graffiti and gang members, and the odd juxtapositions that occur in a bustling city. Together, these groups of street photographs reveal a surprising and vibrant Chicago.

If you’re in the Chicago area before this exhibition leaves, I strongly suggest you take it in.

As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.