Written by DCist contributor Alexa Steinberg.

Doug Hall is one of the leading large-scale color photographers in the country, which probably explains why his work often costs about as much as a college education. Hall’s latest show, Some Places, at the Numark Gallery consists of eight pieces, all of them in the 5′ by 5′ range. The pieces focus on tourists so busy taking pictures of where they are, that no one’s actually looking. We see them at the Guggenheim in New York, in front of Mount Rushmore, on a Piazza in Rome.

Like the German photographers Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, Hall is interested in using a vast depth of field to examine the relationship between the viewer of his work and the viewer within his work. But Gursky’s photographs of trade floors and opera houses and Struth’s of people in museums are sumptuous and emotionally resonant in a way that Hall’s are not. Both Struth and Gursky are able to compose works that cause the viewer to see the world in truly novel ways. Hall’s photographs, outside of their scale, seem more haphazardly conceived, as though Hall himself is not quite sure why he represents one moment and not the next. Such arbitrariness lends to a comparison between Hall’s pictures and those taken by the tourists in his photographs. This tension between photography as art and photography as momento mori could be fascinating if pursued, but Hall does not take his project far enough.

Some Places is at Numark Gallery, 625-27 E Street, NW, through April 15th.