In Wayne Sorce’s color photographs, Chicago and New York City are dense arrangements of neon and hand-lettered signs, bright shop windows, shiny cars and sunlight. The images, which are on view in “Wayne Sorce: Urban Color” until November 30 at Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California, were made in the 1970s and 80s. The large-scale photos depict New York subjects including the facade of a Chock Full o’Nuts coffee shop, and Dave’s Corner Luncheonette, a long-closed 24-hour diner on the corner of Broadway and Canal. Under the El in Chicago, Sorce photographed the handsome exterior of Fort Dearborn Coffee, and elsewhere in the city, rusty spiral-shaped fire escapes that climb the back of three apartment buildings. Like Atget’s studies of Paris from the early 1900s, Sorce’s photos record the displays and styles of goods in shop windows, and function today as records of places that are now greatly changed or gone entirely. Writes the gallery in a statement, Sorce’s “urban landscapes describe with a formal exactitude, the light, structures, and palette of these cities within a certain era.”
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