Tom Wolff at Hillyer Art Space To December 12

Tom Wolff’s 13-piece retrospective at Hillyer Art Space shows his works as they were never seen initially. The Washington-based photographer is best known for his magazine work, from the Washington Post Magazine to House and Garden to Smithsonian. But here his images are blown up to larger-than-life size, so much so that in one photograph of nuclear physicist Edward Teller, every shaft of stubble is distinctly visible. Wolff writes that the exhibition represents “a farewell to the film and chemicals I was so fond of” in today’s all-digital age, and indeed, there is an aura of wistfulness surrounding his mostly black-and-white portraits of Teller, Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams, columnist William Safire, and Sen. Strom Thurmond—all of whom are deceased. Shorn of their magazine-article context, the landscape images are the show’s most enigmatic; in one, a dog and a horse wander a hillside separated by a mysterious, taut rope, while in another, a hand holds a lone feather in the atmospherically moody Wounded Knee.

THE EXHIBITION IS ON VIEW 10 A.M.-5 P.M. MONDAY, 10 A.M.-7 P.M. TUESDAY–FRIDAY, AND 11 A.M.-4 P.M. SATURDAY, TO DEC. 12 AT HILLYER ART SPACE, 9 HILLYER COURT NW. FREE. (202) 338-0680.