Shooting range

Photos: 1) Men’s Central Detention (2000), Scott Fortino and Shashi Caudill Photographs + Fine Art; 2) Jon Lowestein/Aurora; 3) Washington Park, Chicago (girl in green suit), Melissa Pinney and Catherine Edelman Gallery; and 4) Chicago, IL 2003, Brian Ulrich and Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

1. Scott Fortino has worked as a cop for 25 years, so when the Chicago native turned to photography, “the architecture of incarceration,” as he puts it, naturally fascinated him. This holding cell occupied the 13th floor of the police headquarters that stood for more than half a century at 1121 South State Street. One evening, as the vacated building awaited demolition, Fortino used a super wide camera to snap the cell in the late-day light, giving it “a redemptive quality,” he says.

2. Jon Lowenstein was strolling near Division Street and Damen Avenue when he came upon kids dashing through fire-hydrant water. What distinguishes this image from similar shots, Lowenstein believes, is the SUV. “Chicago is getting much more suburbanized; it’s sold to people from the suburbs,” he says. For him, the Wicker Park youths making way for an SUV represent that shift. Yet the social-documentary photog says he takes Chicago shots like this one just for fun.

3. It was summer 2000, in the women’s locker room at Washington Park, when Melissa Pinney picked up her small handheld Leica. She was suddenly captivated, she says, by these two cousins’ unconventional beauty, their swimsuits’ contrasting colors and the reflection. “The unusual hand gesture of the girl in the green especially intrigued me,” she explains. “It was only later, when looking at the proofs, that I discovered that that lovely gesture was meant to cover a tear in her suit.”

4. While Chicagoans in a big-box store at Damen and Clybourn Avenues were struck by the low cost of 64-can cases of Mountain Dew, Brian Ulrich, holding a medium-format camera with a waist-level viewfinder, had a loftier epiphany: the similarity between the shoppers and Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day (a 19th-century painting hanging in the Art Institute).

Photo gallery: See more of Ulrich, Pinney and Fortino's shots from around Chicago.