July is a great month for stepping out of our usual routines, and whether we travel to exotic locales or sit with a lemonade in the backyard, July is a great month for taking pictures of the things that we see around us. Our summer photography exhibition is upbeat and fun, with a summery flavor. It focuses on one of the things that cameras do best -- depicting our lives, unposed. "Out & About" features work by eight photographers who capture contemporary life from a wide variety of angles.

Jay Elliott lives on the Cape and has a sharp eye for scenes that seem to exist in a time warp -- we know these suburban garages and hotel parking lots are in America, but wonder whether we are looking at them in 1960 or today.

Tama Hochbaum points her camera out the airplane window, zeroing in on an experience that is at once extraordinary and peculiarly banal in contemporary life -- flying somewhere, looking out over the wing at the world below, watching the mechanical plane wing and the blurry surrealism of the landscape below overlap.

Stacy Iannacone recently graduated from RISD, and her color images of an indoor swimming pool are cooly composed, focusing on architecture and design in this intriguing public space.

Peter Kayafas, whose work is in the collection of the DeCordova Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, presents work from his series "People in New York." In these close-to-life-sized photographs, Kayafas captures people as they walk by on the streets of New York -- they become frozen for a moment, so we can scrutinize their gestures and their expressions, their clothing and their hairstyle, and try to imagine who they might be and where they might be going.

Jen Kodis, also a recent RISD graduate, photographs the world as she sees it from her home in Acton. The work appears straightforward, yet she is interested in settings in which the world outside is brought inside and vice verse -- thus a golfer practices on his living room rug and a tiger is stenciled on the wall behind the file cabinets in a high school guidance counselor's office.

Annette Lemieux is well-known for art in many media, from painting to installation work to photography. Here, Lemieux presents a disarmingly charming color photograph of a pony in a field, with deeply saturated color, completely out of focus. The photograph becomes a lush abstract work, without losing its reference to landscape photography.

Pia Schachter has been writing and speaking on beauty and etiquette for The Improper Bostonian, CNN, and other magazine, television and radio programs for the past ten years. Her photographs of children at an outdoor rock concert have the great energy and power of the children themselves, unposed, defining the moment in their dress and attitudes, and providing a slice of our moment, right now.

ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY is located at 119 Braintree Street in Allston, near Able Rug and the Sports Depot. Please enter at 129 Braintree, and come up to the second floor. We are open Wednesday through Saturday, from noon - 5 p.m., and by appointment. Please note that we will be open by appointment only in August. For more information, please call Randi Hopkins or Beth Kantrowitz at 617-254-7027.

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