Award-winning photos documenting global recession featured in new exhibit at Gage Gallery

A new photo exhibit that puts a human face on the global economic crisis opens Thursday, Sept. 23 at Roosevelt University’s Gage Gallery, 18 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.

Never before seen in Chicago, “Crisis & Oppportunity: Documenting the Global Recession” features photos that won a SocialDocumentary.net contest in 2009. An opening night reception and lecture for the exhibit will be held at 5 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 23 at Gage.
 
The exhibit features photos by first-place winner Tomasz Tomaszewski, an internationally renowned Polish photographer and regular contributor to National Geographic magazine. His work captures working life in Upper Silesia, Poland, where people perform manual hard labor, but have been losing their jobs to the recession.

Exhibit photos by three honorable mention winners include: shots by Japanese photographer Shiho Fukada, who tells the story of elderly day laborers in Osaka, Japan, who are homeless, without families and outcasts from Japanese society; a black-and white collection by photographer Khaled Hasan on stone laborers fighting for survival in northeastern Bangladesh; and Michael McElroy’s grim, black-and-white photo story of the shattered American dream told through the life of Howard Mallinger, who experiences many losses as his wife dies of cancer.  McElroy will be on hand at the opening night reception to talk about this work.

“In this day and age, economic hardship knows no borders. This exhibit is timely in that it shows us how people across the globe, including Americans, have suffered through global recession,” said Michael Ensdorf, director of the Gage Gallery.

Sponsored by Roosevelt’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Chicago Center for Working Class Studies, the exhibit has viewing hours from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays.  For more information, visit www.roosevelt.edu/gagegallery.

Opened in 2001, Roosevelt University’s Gage Gallery is a leading, not-for-profit photography exhibit space located in the heart of downtown Chicago and across the street from Millennium Park. The gallery hosts a number of free, educational exhibits annually, and two of its exhibits – Nina Berman’s Homeland: Images of Post-9-11 America and Violent Realities and Violent Realities, featuring the work of photographers Jon Lowenstein and Carlos Javier Ortiz - were rated  by New City magazine in the top five at university galleries in Chicago in 2009.