Michael Weinstein

Founded in Chicago in 1929, the Hedrich Blessing architectural photography firm revolutionized the genre by incorporating the most advanced forms of modernist photography to capture—in a perfect fit—the magnificent Art Deco buildings that were rising in the decades between the two world wars. Curator David Jameson has chosen for this alluring exhibition images from the 1930s—taken mainly by founder Ken Hedrich—of elegant and imposing interiors that often work as abstractions that stand alone, apart from any commercial motive. A master of chiaroscuro and composition, Hedrich transcended the document, adding a photographic aesthetic to the sleek yet complex forms that he found before his lens. In the banner image of the show, Hedrich transforms the St. Paul County Court House into a spectacular cathedral that dissolves into ribbons of bright white light and deep black shadow; only a tiny minimalist clock at the bottom center of the image reminds us that we are not in judicial heaven.

Hedrich Blessing, "Interiors: Architectural Photography of the 1930s," shows at Architech Gallery through March 8.

(2008-02-05)

Also by Michael Weinstein

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If you have never been to the Boom Boom Room at Green Dolphin Street on a Monday night, you might be tempted to make a foray there by Bernard Colbert's color performance portraits of JoJo and Sal-E, who strut their stuff with gay abandon at the venue
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Inviting comparison with astral formations, forests, gardens, deserts and seabeds, this exhibition of fifty intricately beautiful microscopic photographs of slices of the nervous system provides compelling evidence for the aesthetic unity of perceived nature
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Among young photo-artists today, two conflicting tendencies assert themselves, one of them struggling for an as-yet-inchoate new vision, and the other depicting the exhaustion of the recent past. The three contributors to this show are the executioners of the past that they have inherited
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