Philadelphia City Paper :: Full Exposure

Full Exposure: Onward and Inward

Curtain, by Keith Sharp, digital color print, 2009, part of the exhibit "Onward '11" at Project Basho.

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It feels like I'm walking in on the middle of an upheaval.

The scene is a crowded, tin-roof warehouse. It's wild and bright, few clues tell me what's happening, and I'm left to hurriedly deduce where the smoke and sparks are coming from and why the ripped shirtless dudes on BMXs are charging one another.

This vivid black-and-white photograph by Brooklynite Julie Glassberg — Jousting Competition in Richmond, Va. — comes from "Bike Kill," her series documenting the outlaw cyclists of the Black Label Bike Club. It's one of many images in Project Basho's "Onward '11" juried show that land viewers in a busy scene and leave them to construct the narrative.

Dina Litovsky's Russian New Year, Club Mansion finds a group of women in party clothes gathered around one of their companions, watching as she undresses. The reaction of her friends ranges from concern to bemusement, to one woman disinterestedly text messaging. Litovsky's bag is social dynamics and group interactions — this shot comes from her "Untag This Photo" series, which studies empowerment through flaunted sexuality, and the corresponding repercussions in the public sphere (hence the Facebook reference) — but, absent that info, we're left with a scene that demands a lot of pondering and explanation. Is this pre-party preparation? Is this a New Year's party that just took a ribald turn?

"Onward '11" is Project Basho's fourth showcase of emerging artists, this year presenting some 70 pictures by 63 artists. For a group show, it has remarkable cohesion — almost every image looks at people to some degree. Those that don't focus directly on them contain hints that they're nearby. Keith Sharp of Media contributes Curtain, a welcoming image of a pastoral pasture unfolding behind a lush hedge of ivy; a hand reaches in from the right of the frame, pulling the foliage back to look at the field beyond. Untitled (Red Cloud) by Tennessee photographer Rowan James shows the dividing line of a remote road at nighttime, flanked by forest and lit only by the headlights of someone's automobile. ...

Full Exposure: School of Life

Unwrapping packages and sorting through frames stacked in the back room of Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, director Amy Adams describes its new exhibit as "absolutely wrong and beautiful."

Opening tonight, "Off Camera" is a compelling survey of nontraditional photography from the 1960s to present. Placing little-known, self-taught artists alongside higher-profile, heavily schooled photographers, it crystallizes the subconscious dialogue between the two camps. This work isn't just alternative process, it disregards process.

"I always thought of photography as very pristine, perfectly printed, no dust on the images, you don't touch the work with your fingerprints," muses Adams. "This is the antithesis of that."

After seeing the work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichy at New York's International Center for Photography last spring, Adams says she was inspired to stage a similar show. A studied painter, Tichy was self-taught when it came to photography. He built his own cameras and shot pictures of unknowing women in his hometown of Kyjov, printed off-focus and cropped awkwardly to just their legs or chests. It's voyeuristic as well as transformative, and Adams says she was drawn in by the brazen defiance of visual convention.

Ten of Tichy's photographs show in "Off Camera," along with work that similarly disregards other rules of photography. A dozen pieces are by Joe "40,000" Murphy, a Chicago usher who had a penchant for getting his snapshot taken with famous faces he encountered on the job — from Charlton Heston to Grace Kelly to a four-star Army general. After getting the shots developed, he would write on top of the print — in colored pen — identifying each person, sometimes shading in lips or eyebrows, or filling in contours that might be lost in an overblown exposure. When he was working with an odd-shaped frame, Murphy cut the image to fit. If he found a location he would rather be seen in, he cut out himself and whomever he was shot with, and pasted them in the new scene.

May Wilson also inserted herself into impro...

Full Exposure: Confidence Game

Wexler Gallery

TOP TO BOTTOM: Sarah/Black Fan (detail), Open Hands, Comfort, Crow's Mask (detail); all photographs by Leah Macdonald.

Do you feel comfortable in your body?

This isn't a gender-exclusive question — I sure don't. Judging from the dour facial expressions on photographer Leah Macdonald's subjects, many of them don't, either — but not the ones you'd expect.

"In My Body" draws from two decades worth of female nude studies, with the central goal being the promotion of positive body image. Macdonald, a Philadelphia photographer, began photographing nudes as a college student in San Francisco after being involved in a motorcycle accident in the early '90s. She felt withdrawn, self-conscious, she says, so she placed an ad in a local weekly — "Wanted: women to model for fine art photographs who have evidence of LIFE, TRAUMA OR INJURY. Call Leah."

The response was enough to begin a project that eventually would fill numerous scrapbooks — women of all ages, all races, all sizes. Compiled into the "In My Body" exhibit, the work becomes a mirror of her subjects: older images as well as recent ones, wall-size canvases adjoining smaller prints on paper. Surrounded by her work at Wexler one recent afternoon, Macdonald recounts the obstacles it encountered over the years.

"Whenever I showed my photos early in my career, I always heard, 'Do people really want to see scars? Do they want to buy photos of people missing limbs?'" Gathering it under an umbrella like this, she says, gives the images context. It underscores the project's central theme that "beauty" is a social construct, and finding personal comfort and confidence is of greater importance than forcing one's physical appearance to meet some rigid, artificially prescribed standard.

In some regards,...

Full Exposure: Calendar Boys

North Philly warehouse is awash in hues of red, black, white and yellowish brown. A carnival-esque crowd fills the wings: contortionists stretching, a pole-walker strutting, an acrobat hanging, musicians playing. An androgynous figure stands at center, sporting a top hat and striped tights, a light moustache, shirt slightly unbuttoned, head slightly cocked, looking slyly at the lens.

This festive scene is a standout in Sarah Green's 2011 "Glitterlip" drag calendar (being released in a Dec. 4 variety show at Adobe Café on East Passyunk), even though the Philly photographer would tweak it if she could.

"Oh, I definitely like it," she says of the shot. "I just had this vision of a crazy carnival, people blowing fire or spinning fire. I had this concept of filling up the empty space with a wall of loud people doing loud things."

To a degree, the calendar shows Green's vision. To a degree, she wants to respect the vision of the people she photographed. Some are performing drag queens, some are friends who felt like dressing in drag; many are both. Green asked each what their dream photo shoot would be, and she made it happen through brilliant art direction.

A colorful photo starring performer Dave End is set in a candy shop. Our subject wears a bright pink cake dress, adorned with pinned-on plastic fruits: red raspberries, yellow lemons, orange oranges. In congress with the multicolored checkered floor and jars of jelly beans in the background, the colors practically leap out of the frame.

By comparison, a mostly monochromatic image can be just as much of a blast. Joey "Juicebox" Parzenese dresses as a superhero: black Uma Thurman-circa- Pulp Fiction wig, black unitard, black shoes, gray cape and tights, standing on a gray sidewalk against a painted black wall (pictured). A bright red ray gun is pointed at some unseen enemy, and Juicebox makes a comical, aggressive sneer.

Each subject picked his idea and wardrobe, while Green scouted for a matching location.

"I'm attracted to color, and I'm always paying attention," she says. "I look for bright places, but plain bright places."

This is the second year Green has put together a drag calendar; the proje...

Full Exposure: Crisis Connection

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"I wanted people to be able to smell the mold. I wanted them to feel the shell shock I felt."

Christina Molieri stands in the warm lobby of the William Way Community Center, surrounded by stark images of destruction in pointed silver gelatin prints. "The Lower Nine: A Post-Katrina Odyssey" (through Oct. 31) documents the Philly photographer's time volunteering with Common Ground, a relief organization based in the section of New Orleans hit hardest by the hurricane five years ago.

One image shows a building reduced to a splintery shack; it sits down the road from the I-10 overpass where helicopters swooped in and recovered trapped residents. Another depicts a rusted lock box; when her work crew popped it open, they found a house deed and an old coin collection. Nearby hangs a photo of recovered baby pictures from a christening.

"Water preserves the strangest things," Molieri recalls, adding that a member of her team uncovered the Aug. 28, 2005, edition of the Times-Picayune. Headline: "Katrina Takes Aim."

The devastation looks intense, but the images were taken nearly a year and a half after Katrina made landfall. Molieri volunteered in March of 2007 while enrolled at Bryn Mawr College. "We were discussing all these issues about social justice, all this theory," she says. "And I thought, 'What am I doing? I'm in a classroom.'"

Upon arrival, the pace of recovery shocked her. The French Quarter seemed to have bounced back by comparison; the Lower Ninth Ward still "looked like Beirut."

Molieri laughs when I use the term "rebuilding effort." "We weren't rebuilding anything," she says. "At that point, we were still tearing things down."

For the most part, the first suite of images focuses on those structures. An overgrown backyard encroaches on a collapsing shed. Floor joists crackle. Piles of books and belongings slope o...

Full Exposure: Claim to Unfame

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Somewhere between the paparazzi and party photographers sat Andy Warhol.

In a selection of his black-and-white prints on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), we find the modernist impresario documenting fellow movers and shakers on the New York City scene in the late '70s and early '80s. The snaps are lively, capricious and intimate; we see big names like Keith Haring and Neil Sedaka, caught in candid moments at galleries and clubs.

That intimacy proved to be a point of frustration for the gossip-rag photographers of the era. As the exhibit notes point out, Warhol was an insider, a known artist, a celebrity himself. He didn't have to wait at the door outside the nightclub, and he didn't make subjects flinch or duck when he pointed his camera at them. Being photographed by Andy, in these circles, was an honor.

By the same token, Warhol exploited this trust. Many of the images on the wall at PAFA are uncouth and unflattering. We see his studio assistant, Jay Shriver, mouth agape in the middle of eating a slice of pizza. We see 20/20 anchor Hugh Downs, shnockered at a party, his arm around an anonymous woman. Warhol's mission statement was that he sought out photos of "a famous person doing something unfamous," that a good photo meant "being in the right place at the wrong time." Clearly, Warhol wasn't very different from the paparazzi.

That's without even mentioning that many of these, technically speaking, are not good photos. Downs is out of focus. Haring is framed awkwardly and underexposed. Shots of Liza Minnelli speaking at a formal dinner were seemingly taken with the 1970s equivalent of cheap disposable cameras left at each place setting. Warhol shot with a 35 mm automatic, and it shows. Many images feel rushed and awkward, constrained and snapshot-y.

Photos of Christopher Makos prove somewhat more interesting, at least on a geometric leve...

Full Exposure: Ready for Their Close-Up

Tiffany Yoon

There once was a time when Philly's live music fans and their cameras didn't easily mix.

In the '90s, the heavy-handed Troc crew confiscated even the most basic Kodak disposables from concert-goers. Restrictions were equally draconian at larger venues like the Spectrum, where the press covering the show up close was more obvious a frustrating thing to see from the stands.

Lisa Schaffer remembers that feeling from a 2003 White Stripes concert at the Tweeter Center. "I had really bad seats," she recalls. "And I watched these photographers walk right in with their bags and I was like, 'Why am I not doing that?'"

With this goal in mind, Schaffer set to work and became one of Philadelphia's most prominent music and concert photographers. But in recent years, it's become a less exclusive club. Venue security is increasingly lax about people bringing their smaller, personal cameras to shows, instead going after advanced models with interchangeable lenses, meaning anybody with a point-and-shoot and a desire to push to the front of a crowd can now snap once-unattainable photos.

With the summer concert season rolling onward, and outdoor festivals like June's Roots Picnic and next month's Philadelphia Folk Fest bringing greater visibility to attendees with lenses, I convened a roundtable of some of Philly's ubiquitous concert photographers to discuss the current state of what we do.

Michael Alan Goldberg of Philadelphia Weekly has a significant photographic presence on the alt-weekly's Make Major Moves blog. He catches details that often fly by set lists, marquees, broken drumsticks and arranges them in narrative, magazine-style galleries (he's also shot for Spin and Blender). "You can get caught up in getting the perfect picture ...

Full Exposure: Thanks for the Memories

Like family snapshots, memories fade in time.

Exact colors and circumstances, people and places all become a monochromatic wash of foggy nonspecificity as time passes. Photographs are, in a vernacular sense, meant to preserve these moments, and even they are stricken with impermanence.

Kaitlin Mosley embraces that fragility. Her current solo exhibition, "Expiration" (on display at The Light Room's new salon space at 20th and Wallace), is a collection of hazy, dreamlike images shot on chemically expired color film. The aged medium causes some colors to fade and others to shift. It conjures distortion and noise that pops up across the frame. Generally, it makes Mosley's scenes seem on the verge of disappearing into obscurity.

"Ship" depicts a sailboat drifting in a harbor, but both vessel and water are indistinct. Here, the expired film plays with existing conditions a misty body of water, a purposefully underexposed shot and compounds them, making the picture translucent and haunting.

Elsewhere, the colors of the old film have blended into a reduced palette. In Chickens, we see a coopside flock digging for seed on a farm, feathers flapping in blurry motion. Everything is no more than a step removed from brown, either in a reddish direction (the animals themselves) or a lighter beige (the grass and trees).

Since Mosley gravitates toward natural surroundings, this range of colors builds only slightly across other images in the show. In Crabbers, a group walking along a marsh with nets and rope is delivered with subtle touches of olive and pastel blue. The woodsy scene of Chevy Van an old vehicle, abandoned amid trees adds flecks of parchment yellow to the mix.

The latter image, despite its generally mysterious air, is one of Mosley's more subtle. The expired film caused only slight fading in this case. Placed in the context...

Full Exposure: Negative Space

There was a time in photography's infancy when a humble landscape picture could seem like an illusion.

Take clouds: Their brightness kept them from appearing in early photographs. In the late 1850s, Gustave Le Gray changed this by pioneering his combination printing process in famed images of the French seashore. One negative was exposed to properly catch the details of the sky; one negative was exposed for the land and sea; and the two were layered in a single print.

It seemed believable at first blush, but sticklers pointed out the flaws. The clouds cast no shadow on the ground. They didn't reflect in the water. The scene didn't seem real, exactly.

A century and a half later, these arguments seem quaint. In her image of a tree perched on a rural hillside, Ruth Humpton shoots billowy clouds in muted, even tones. The photo is completely plausible and plain, an innocuous, commonplace scene that would never stir up debate.

The rest of her exhibit at 3rd Street Gallery, not so much. Humpton's "Realistic/Imaginary Photographs" enhances rural/pastoral scenery with a mix of black-and-white combination printing and old-fashioned hand-coloring. Unlike Le Gray, the Philadelphia-area photographer doesn't always use these techniques to portray a difficult-to-capture real-world scene. More often, Humpton's images are fantastical composites, and the results are uneven.

Celestial imagery is prominent. In a photo of hay bales dotting a shorn field, a long farm road stretches into the distance, dreamily emptying into a speckled backdrop of nighttime stars. This use of two negatives is tidy and thoughtful, the scene tranquil. Elsewhere, it can be awkward.

On the gallery's far wall, a photo shows the barren bumps of desert hills in its lower half. In its upper half, a telescopic image of the sun is layered in, arcing flares licking away at the dusty scene. As if the sensation she aimed for...

Full Exposure: Man Vs. Wild

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Philadelphia has Henry Horenstein in some unlikely juxtapositions this spring.

First, the tail end of the Boston photographer's "SHOW" at Gallery 339 — a bawdy, campy exploration of the burlesque world, done in pointed black and white — ran up against the opening of "Looking at Animals," a more family-appropriate exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences collecting sepia abstracts from the zoo, the farm and his own backyard.

Striking perhaps a starker contrast than nudes-and-tattoos versus antlers-and-hooves images (both depict bodies, after all), the Academy hangs Horenstein's work alongside specimens from its collection, juxtaposing what artists and scientists find interesting in the animals they study.

Upon entering the dimly lit second-floor gallery, one of the first photos to stand out from the left wall is Giant Pacific Octopus. Shot in fluid soft focus, its tentacles wrap and fill most of the frame in overlapping mounds; in the top third, we see the reticent animal's eye protruding, and the blackness of the ocean (or aquarium, perhaps) backdropping it.

The warm image of this Pacific octopus sits next to a Plexiglas cylinder lit in iridescent yellows, blues and greens, containing "Walter" — a full-body octopus specimen that's been at the museum since the 1960s. Floating in an alcohol solution, Walter is crumpled and lifeless, a rubbery tangled mass bearing little resemblance to the resplendent creature depicted in Horenstein's image.

The dichotomy is even stronger when you compare how the artist and scientists see giraffes. Both avoid making a thing of the neck, which is refreshing. Horenstein's Smoky Giraffe hones in on three of the animal's muscular legs, bunched together like a spotted vase. It puts the knobby knees in the forefront, raising the question of how these seemingly diminutive joints are able to carry the monumental creature above them.

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Full Exposure: Mega Masters

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Philadelphia-based photographic art magazine Megawords presents a world free of text. A world where images arranged smartly on the page adopt their own lyrical quality.

We see the vertical lines of a metal factory roof intersect with the horizontal lines of venetian blinds, sharply pitting domesticity against industry. One photo shows a shirtless young man aiming a revolver at the camera (pictured); next to it are the bathing suit-clad hips of some beach-going friends; below is the abandoned shell of a building.

Over five years and a dozen issues — the most recent one published in late 2009 — Megawords has, in a loose, collaged manner, studied the ways we interact with the relics of an aging urban society. Likewise, the magazine's showcase at New York City independent publishing hub Printed Matter (through April 3) is like a three-dimensional scrapbook.

In the front window of the Chelsea bookstore sits a dented, rusted Megawords honor box and a small television with a slideshow on loop. Maneuvering through the crowd to the exhibit in back finds six display cases filled with objects and ephemera: books, biker caps, cameras and cassettes (My Bloody Valentine, Wu-Tang Clan, Sufi instrumental music).

Megawords co-founder Anthony Smyrski says the cases are a way of creating ambience and atmosphere around their work. "It's physical stuff that inspires us," he explains.

The walls above are filled with stunning prints of photographs from recent issues, free of frames and densely layered around proofs and color separation plates. Smyrski calls the latter elements a study of the process and a nod to the folks in the Canadian printing facility they use; "People don't think about the workers who actually print the magazine."

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Aged and succumbing to Parkinson's disease, Edward Weston set up his camera on the rocky California coast in 1948 and framed up his final photographs.

This study of Monterey's Point Lobos resulted in an image he subtitled Something Out of Nothing. It hangs in a quiet corner of the Michener Museum's Della Penna-Fernberger Gallery as part of "Life Work," a retrospective of this master of 20th-century photography. Examining the print in the context of those surrounding it, its name seems terribly misplaced. It shows dark rocks, scattered haphazardly on the sand and loosely framed. There's no order, the scene is not composed in an evocative manner; it's nothing, not something.

Weston rarely employed titles that went beyond literal descriptions; perhaps he had saved this one for years, ultimately deciding to sling it on one of his final works, whether or not it fit. But Something Out of Nothing seems a more apt description of his oeuvre than this particular print.

Throughout "Life Work" we see photographs working on dual levels — as an image of the object itself, and as an image of what else the object appears to be. His nudes resemble landscapes and fruits, while his still lifes resemble nudes. The work is rich in subliminal subtext, and one wonders what Freud might have said about Weston.

An armchair analysis: His attempts to be a family man conflicted with his, er, problems with monogamy. The biographical notes accompanying the exhibit cite three major mistresses in addition to his two wives. And that's before you get to the room displaying his famous nude photographs, read "most models were also his lovers" and then find ano...

Full Exposure: My Friend Flickr

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When submissions closed for their photography group show, Erica Maxwell and Allison Krumm didn't have any cumbersome frames or clumsy prints to contend with. The work wasn't piled up in some stuffy gallery basement, and they didn't have to worry about who was going to pick up the entries that didn't make the cut. The submissions were — at that point, anyway — still floating around in the ethers of the Internet.

"We're so excited to get people's work off Flickr and onto walls," Maxwell gushed.

In most other respects, the second edition of local blog Phillyist's "Framed" exhibition doesn't differ from the typical group photography show. It showcases work in color and black-and-white, pastoral landscapes as well as bustling urban settings, and a general range of subject matter within them. There's the playfully absurd — Kristopher Chain-Harris' Boba Fett depicts the iconic intergalactic bounty hunter rocking an Ibanez six-string in a South Philly backyard. There's also the poignant, like Mike Drzal's color image Don't Drink. Don't Smoke. (pictured), a tight crop of an old man's weathered face, staring despondently into the lens.

But unlike many juried shows that still rely on physical submissions, "Framed" required entrants to simply post their photos to the Phillyist Flickr group for consideration. Krumm says the online photography community is so active locally, it's easy to generate interest.

"It stems back to Kyle Cassidy and photo blogging," says Krumm, noting that the West Philadelphia photographer's various Photo-A-Week projects, dating back to 2000, set a template for Photoist, the picture-a-day arm of ...

Full Exposure: Real Magic

It feels like Frederick Sommer's images are begging for vivid adjectives and heady descriptions.

"Bewitching" comes to mind; the portraiture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Frederick Sommer Photographs" shows subjects who seem entranced, stoically gazing about in an attempt to come to terms with the doldrums by which they're surrounded.

"Desolate" works, as well; the first foray the Italy-born, Brazil-bred Sommer took into photography was in the desert surrounding Prescott, Ariz., where he lived and worked for most of his life. Or "ghastly," which is how I'm guessing the tourists bolting from the exhibit on my first visit felt about his "Chicken Parts" series.

But after a few trips through the show, I keep coming back to a chestnut of critical jargon: "magical realism." This goes against the conventional wisdom tying Sommer's work more specifically to surrealism. Perhaps he is viewed in that regard for his iconic 1946 portrait of surrealist/Dadaist painter Max Ernst (pictured). But as far as the PMA retrospective goes, that Ernst image is the closest the photographer gets to achieving a truly surreal image.

In it, the painter is shirtless, standing against a doorway. Superimposed on top of him is a shot of a rock, its dark shades and sharp grooves blending with Ernst's pale white skin to make him look quite literally statuesque, or like a thinly translucent spectre.

This effect was achieved by sandwiching two negatives atop each other. And although many of the show's other images prove equally confounding and compelling (like "Venus, Jupiter, Mars," where two illustrated men and a woman sit for afternoon tea in the middle of a forest), these otherworldly appearances are largely achieved through natural means, not manipulation in the studio (it's a close crop of an old advertisement poster, torn to reveal the poster beneath).

Look at Sommer's Arizona landscapes, which he famously shot...

Full Exposure: Anything Goes

The paint is still drying and the prints are still packed up when I walk up the stoop into My House Gallery in early November.

Its denizens, from founders Hannah Heffner and Alex Gartelmann, to friends like Kaitlin Mosley and Jim "Young James" Grilli, are in a flurry, rushing around the living room (it ain't called My House for nothing), finishing the prep work for the gallery's current exhibition. It's their 11th overall, the first dedicated entirely to photography, and the scent of fresh coffee and stale sweat wafts off the very active bunch.

To outsiders, the group might come off as a bunch of Boho art school grads living collectively on a rough-ish block in deep South Philly because rent is cheap, thus giving them the freedom to comfortably turn their living space into a show space. They probably wouldn't dispute this too much because, well, it's kind of true. The My Housers are all former sculpture students at UArts except for Mosley, a photographer, and Gartelmann says the fact that the space is so remote, kind of the only game in town, has been a boon for attendance at exhibits thus far.

But using these identity traits to dismiss their shows would be a mistake.

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"We encourage our artists to push the boundaries of t...

Full Exposure: Manifold Destiny

If the raison d'être of staggered exhibitions is giving arts scenes the space and time to gestate ideas, Woodmere Art Museum's Third Triennial of Contemporary Photography surveys the fruits of that growth in a comprehensive arc.

Alongside Zoe Strauss' haunting photos from a recent excursion to Alaska sit John Dowell's curiously reflexive metropolitan cityscapes (City Hall, pictured, detail). Documentarian Ron Tarver dabbles in digital abstracts with a celestial feel, while Andrea Modica shows traditional nudes posing with puzzling props like dead birds and dried fish.

"It's a show of contrasts," says curator Stephen Perloff, editor of The Photo Review. "It's not just portraits, not just landscapes, not just computer-manipulated images. These are photographers employing a broad range of tools."

The profile of the eight artists is equally broad. Perloff said his curatorial M.O. followed the Woodmere Triennial's usual path — one master photographer from greater Philly (in the past, Ray Metzker and Larry Fink), shown alongside a mix of established names and emerging artists.

In this case, the master is Emmet Gowin, whose 1996 series "Changing the Earth" receives its first local exhibit. The 16 images mix aerial and on-the-ground perspectives of Nevada nuclear test sites in Yucca Lake, Yucca Flat and Frenchman Flat. Perloff calls the series "even more eco-conscious at the moment than in some past times." The traditional silver prints study a barren landscape pockmarked with craters. Diagnostic Array hammers home their ridiculous size; shot from a plane, it shows buildings surrounded by several holes large enough to swallow all of them. Other shots focus on the craters individually. Sedan Crater, framed and shaded by a setting sun, looks positively lunar, but the desolation is not natural.

Starting with preparations for the nation's bicentennial and ending with the MOVE bombing and its fallout, "Streets of Philadelphia: Photography 1970-1985" is a time capsule of a city in transition. But what's most striking as you wander through the exhibit is how much the city seems the same.

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We drive different cars, yes, and gangs of teenagers dress differently. But many of the motifs that recur among the 21 photographers on display ring true today. Philadelphia still seems perpetually under construction. It is still a place where one can see bright festivities a breath away from unfortunate blight. And once a year, a bunch of manly men still dress up as ladies and parade tipsily down Broad Street.

Take Don Camp's Chinatown Life (pictured), shot on the 900 block of Race Street in 1973. It tightly frames a dense pileup of cars parked at meters, layered alongside vertical storefront signs in a variety of languages. Delivery trucks double-park to rush goods in and out of businesses, and the arc of the Ben Franklin Bridge spans the background. The frenzied block was shot more than three decades ago, and looks more or less like it did last week.

In selecting works, curator John Caperton used a loose definition of street photography, showcasing images of people as well as places, e...

Full Exposure: Digi Snaps

When Sarah Stolfa drew up a call for work to show at the opening of her new photography space, she included only one, very deliberate criterion: The artists had to be from Philadelphia.

The 21 photographers represented in the inaugural juried exhibition at Stolfa's Philadelphia Photo Arts Center are an otherwise eclectic bunch. The show includes color and black-and-white images, both digital and traditional silver; and imaginatively staged portraits, like Kyle Ferino's Death of a Salesman (pictured), sitting alongside haunting abstractions, such as D.M. Whitman's untitled image of a blurred, hazy nude floating facedown in a pool of water.

But all the work was done by emerging artists from the city, underscoring the importance of that first "P" in the center's acronym.

"I wanted to show that the PPAC is very dedicated to Philadelphia photographers," Stolfa says. The juror — Ariel Shanberg of the Center for Photography at Woodstock — was equally deliberate, Stolfa continues. "I also want to make Philadelphia part of the national and international dialogue about the medium."

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With this mission of presenting local work while drawing the attention of outside eyes — resident artists, guest curators — Stolfa and the PPAC join a handful of like-minded photography nonprofits in Philadelphia. Some groups (such as Fishtown's Project Basho) are more active than others (like Center City's ...

Full Exposure: Death Becomes Her

"We all did that when we were teenagers," says Kyle Cassidy of his penchant for taking self-portraits in a rigor mortis pose. "Some of us stopped."

But the West Philadelphia photographer never tired of the unusual aesthetic. "Fallen," his 1999 gallery exhibition, was a showcase of glamour shots in which the models were done up to appear deceased. His current project is a collaboration with Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, who also likes to pretend she's cold for the camera.

For Cassidy, it was an obvious partnership: The two shared a mischievous fixation with mortality, and he was in need of a lighthearted project.

His last showing was 2007's Armed America, a sociological study of gun owners in their homes. The book received critical acclaim, but straddling the middle of the heated Second Amendment debate left Cassidy drained. "Coming off Armed America, it was wonderful to have a project without all this weight on it," he says.

To some, Who Killed Amanda Palmer? (JSR Merchandising, July 7) would hardly seem weightless, but the series is very much in jest. A companion to Palmer's 2008 album of the same name, the book was initially conceived as album art. Cassidy met Palmer in the early aughts when his old band Nicki Jaine opened for The Dresden Dolls in Boston. They kept in touch, and over the years the Dolls would crash at his house when they played Philadelphia. Photo shoots often ensued — a collection of his Dresden Dolls portraits showed at NEXUS in 2005 — and when Palmer needed promo shots for her solo outing, she tapped Cassidy.

What's a showcase of Yale University's M.F.A. photography class doing 180 miles south of New Haven?

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When Gallery 339 hosted the exhibit last year, the answer was more obvious. One of the prestigious program's 2008 graduates was noted Philadelphia photographer Sarah Stolfa. Her portrait series of McGlinchey's patrons, "The Regulars," drew national acclaim and had its last major showing at 339 the previous autumn. It stood to reason that Stolfa would show her M.F.A. work at the gallery representing her — and bring along some of her colleagues.

The exhibition's return raises more questions. Will it become a regular part of 339's programming? Do other galleries take it in, making it a touring exhibit of contemporary up-and-comers?

Martin McNamara of 339 responds with a favorite phrase of his. "It's a lot more informal than that."

The connection, it turns out, is still Stolfa. McNamara says she advocated for the younger class of M.F.A. students she befriended while at Yale. The showcase will also pop up in other locales with ties to the artists — Capricious Space in Brooklyn, Eighth Vale gallery in Los Angeles &...