Illuminating - Lightning bolt At the Grog Shop, March 29, 2007.

The urban landscape has long attracted photographers. From the late 19th-early 20th-century work of Eugene Atget, documenting Paris in radical transition, and the 1930s work of Brassai, who captured the same city's nocturnal mystery, to Berenice Abbott's documentation of a bursting-at-the-seams New York in the '30s, photographers have found the structures of the city and the life they suggest to be visually inspiring. Even Cleveland has come under the scrutiny of the lens of one of the genre's greatest practitioners, when photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White documented a thriving, growing Cleveland as a manufacturing powerhouse in the late '20s.

The urban landscape is the strongest part of local photographer Lou Muenz's work, too, comprising more than half of the almost 30 shots in More Tales from the Rust Belt, his first solo show, which is currently hanging at Parish Hall.

Muenz has the city in his blood. He arrived in Cleveland from Pittsburgh in 1985, but hung up his still camera until the arrival of inexpensive digital gear made it possible to fill memory cards with hundreds of shots. He began roaming the city and capturing it in all its moods. He's also a familiar figure in the underground music scene, shooting at venues such as Parish Hall, Pat's in the Flats and the Grog Shop. These shots make up the other segment of the show, with one odd blurred-motion shot of a bicyclist on Euclid Avenue that fits in neither category and seems to have wandered in from another show.

The concert shots are fine as far as they go. Because they depict obscure artists who will be known to few viewers, the fame factor that haunts most rock photography — that inability to separate your response to the photo from your response to the performer — is removed from the equation. But most of these photos don't feel special; the moments aren't revelatory and because of the problems inherent in shooting in small clubs — positioning, backgrounds and the necessity of wielding the not-always-appreciated flash in a crowded room — technical execution is catch-as-catch-can, with the flash in particular negating one of photography's wellsprings of creativity: the ability to create or capture light.

Muenz's most effective concert shots are the ones that show the interaction of the audience and performer. The standout in the bunch is one of Lightning Bolt taken at the Grog Shop the day before his show opened. Here he appears not to have used flash, and the crowd that completely envelopes the band is brushed by an overhead light that illuminates the welter of faces in little dribs and drabs. Rather than the cliché concert-crowd expressions of frenzy or fervor, the light reveals faces that are rapt, pensive and intent. That same light, coming from above and behind, rims the profile of the drummer who anchors the bottom of the photo giving it a center of interest.

There's one other real standout in this bunch, where Muenz's sharp eye transcended the limitations imposed by the shooting situation. In a shot of the local band Soft Spots, two musicians are seen in tight close-up, a male musician in the right foreground so close to the lens he's out of focus, his head tilted at a 45-degree angle. Behind him at left, a woman guitarist stands at a microphone; she's in sharp focus. The musician at right, practically inside the lens, and the other, whose clarity makes her pop out, pull the eye back and forth, fighting to be the center of attention, creating a dynamic tension within the frame and drawing the viewer onto the stage and into the players' world.

Soft Spots - Welcome to their world.

But the concert photos feel incidental to the real business of the show: the shots of a bleak and barren Cleveland cityscape. The heart and soul of the series is a dozen shots taken at the old LTV steel plant which has now given way to Steelyard Commons shopping center. These hulking structures and their accoutrements — metal guard rails, rusted and paint-peeling signs, corrugated doors, and expanses of cracked-pavement and rock-strewn parking lots — are mute testimony to prosperity passed by. Whereas Bourke-White's shots were filled with action, Muenz's, reflecting a different era, are static and still — unpeopled landscapes, sprawling parking lots without cars, access roads without trucks and loading docks without workers unloading their wares.

Muenz made the decision to print these shots as sepia tones, some entirely without color, others with dashes of color in shots dominated by rust-belt gray or brown. It's an effective tactic, shocking the eye here and there, most effectively in a shot of a dark corrugated metal building with a sidewalk leading to the entrance, flanked by a pair of bright orange guardrails. At one side of the entrance is a tattered, freestanding sign picturing a basketball and hoop and the legend "Shoot for safety" in brilliant white and yellow.

The buildings in shot after shot loom forebodingly, like eternal monoliths whose elimination to make way for a shopping center is difficult to absorb. A yard with a stack of palettes is enclosed by high buildings that give it the trapped feeling of a jail yard. In another, a giant dark structure labeled "machine shop" rises pyramid-like over the swath of cracked pavement in the foreground. Muenz' liberal use of wide-angle enlarges the buildings and presses them down on the viewer, while expanding the emptiness in front of them. The pavement is the dynamic force in a shot that features a row of buildings in mid-ground with a guardrail sweeping up past them from the bottom of the shot, framing a toppled marker in the foreground that reads, "emergency evacuation meeting place." The evacuation is clearly complete.

Muenz uses diagonals in his compositions especially skillfully as the roofs of buildings bisect and draw together, working with the wide angles to create a sense of claustrophobia that's not relieved even when the shot features an exit — a road, flanked by rows of long low buildings, that leads to a low white building, for instance.

The show also features a half-dozen other cityscapes that aren't part of this industrial series, and they're a mixed bag. The sun-dappled color shots — the brick wall of an old office or industrial building with rows of windows, some boarded up, and a high-angle shot of rooftops with downtown in the background — are least effective. But a pair of these, both black-and-white shots, are as good as anything in the show and refer back at least tangentially to the LTV shots. One, titled "Trainyard West 3rd 2006," shows the hulking silhouettes of tanker cars at night, with the smokestacks of a factory faintly outlined above and behind them.

The other, called "Metro Roof 2003," is another scene of rooftops, but far more effective. A tangle of modest, working-class houses in the snow fills the foreground with small industrial buildings in the rear and a water tower punctuating the top center like an exclamation mark. It visually suggests the relationship between domestic life and the industrial economy, and how the latter quietly but inexorably presses on the former.