"Re-: Photographs by Pamela Bannos, Jennifer Greenburg, Alice Hargrave, and Corrie Witt"

How does the present transform the past? What is the relationship between photography and reality? Four Chicago photographers explore the answers to these questions in “Re-.”

Pamela Bannos blurs portions of vintage black-and-white photographs to highlight elements that might otherwise be ignored. One print depicts a group of men and women in a suburban backyard, looking at something off-camera. They stand in the foreground, but the viewer connects with the only figure in focus: a little girl on the periphery who is walking away. Bannos’s innovative process adds new layers of meaning to her isolation.

Nostalgia permeates Jennifer Greenburg’s documentation of rockabillies, the young, mostly white, working-class men and women who have built a subculture on an affinity for mid-20th-century American cars, furniture, clothes and values. Greenburg’s crinolined and pompadoured subjects inhabit a carefully curated world that elides the darker aspects of their favorite era. (Though, strangely, they embrace its leopard-print chairs.)

The exhibition also includes four prints from Alice Hargrave’s “Home (movies)” series, which reproduces frames from 8mm films as digital photos. Familiar images from middle-class vacations acquire a kind of static in the transfer from one medium to another, and take on a sinister rusty tinge.

Corrie Witt photographs domestic interiors, such as the room decorated with a dollhouse, plants and family photos in Doll House. The image—simultaneously cozy and disorienting—was taken in a dollhouse-size replica of Witt’s own apartment. It could be a metaphor for “Re-” itself: tiny, but full of innovation.—Lauren Weinberg