News

Goings On About Town: Art

by Vince Aletti

Michael Wolf / Barbara Crane at Aperture

The New Yorker

1/4/2010

Chicago is the subject of both these photographers-Wolf focusses on the city itself, in works from 2007, while Crane zeroes in on its people, in a knockout series of Polaroids made in the early eighties. Details of Wolf’s large-scale pictures of glowing glass skyscrapers afford us views nearly as intimate as Crane’s. By enlarging telephoto shots of people caught unawares in their offices or apartments, he creates grainy portraits that look like stills from surveillance feed. Crane actually gets right up next to the people in her pictures-so close you can practically feel their body heat. Like Mark Cohen and Jessica Craig-Martin, she shows only fragments of her subjects, but she doesn’t leave you unsatisfied. Through Jan. 21. (Aperture, 547 W. 27th St. 212-505-5555.)