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THURSDAY

Photographer Fred J. Maroon was best known for chronicling his adopted hometown of Washington—and particularly for the insider access that enabled him to produce, at a quarter-century’s distance in 1999, a Smithsonian exhibition and book that documented the Nixon White House’s Watergate crackup. But “Sorrow and Splendor: Images of Europe, 1950-1951” carries viewers to a much different time and place—a Europe only recently recovered from the furies of war, seen by Maroon, then in his mid-20s. It’s a project Maroon was working on when he died in 2001, now brought to completion by his widow, Suzy Maroon. Many of the exhibition’s 35 black-and-white images mirror the sort of urban street photojournalism that had been standard since the ’20s. But when Maroon gets more abstract—as in his moody, fog-filled photographs of St. Mark’s Square in Venice, or his shot of Paris’ headlamp-lit Place de la Concorde at dusk—his work rises to the level of art. The exhibition is on view to Wednesday, Oct. 2, including today from noon to 5 p.m. at the Kathleen Ewing Gallery, 1609 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 328-0955. (Louis Jacobson)