Lovely black and white, globe-trotting photography at Lumiere

Bottom line: A charming retrospective of a local photographer’s decades-long vision.

Black and white has largely fallen out of favor for contemporary photographers, with large-format color work holding sway at many galleries and museums. But black and white proves an ideal choice for Atlanta-based photographer Mario DiGirolamo. A doctor and scientist by day, this photographer by avocation brings a real timelessness to his images in “Visione: A Midcentury Photographic Memoir” at Lumiere Gallery, a show that coincides with the release of his book by the same name.

DiGirolamo’s images span decades — from the 1950s to the 2000s in the images on view here — but have a look and tone that often make it hard to guess the decade when they were taken.

The Rome-born photographer often returns to European locations steeped in Old World character to shoot, something that helps give his images their hard-to-time-stamp, eternal qualities. In narrow European streets devoid of advertising or subjects wearing trendy clothes, life unfolds as it probably always has: groups of Roman men gather for a game of cards; two elderly women confer over tea at an outdoor Parisian cafe; a little boy with a soccer ball pauses next to a clothes line in the melancholy “Dreaming of a Game,” shot in 1958 Rome. The images could be from 1950, 1960 or 1990, and there is something comforting in DiGirolamo’s assertion that the human condition is an enduring thing, despite the changing tides of history.

Many of his images convey a sense of isolation by locating subjects amid devouring architectural spaces and vast landscapes. Particularly striking on that front is “Solitude, Italian Countryside” (1957), featuring a man as forlorn as the leaf-stripped winter trees that surround him. In “Anglesea Free House” (1955), a man sits in a contemplative funk, cheek resting on his hand despite the cheerful drinkers and general sense of merriment surrounding him in a busy British pub.

But DiGirolamo is no one-trick pony. He also brings a real sense of wit and serendipity to many of his photographs. A favorite is his image of a well-dressed elderly couple both sporting natty hats and tailored jackets peeping through slats in a wooden fence like illegal spectators at a ballgame or Times Square creeps. The combination of something elicit in that gesture and their very upstanding wardrobe provides a satisfying jolt of wry comedy. DiGirolamo repeats the effect in an open-air Russian market in “St. Petersburg, Russia” (1999), where one of two white-haired women selling fish hoists a dried fish to her face to hide from the photographer.

Social commentary occasionally asserts itself in DiGirolamo’s images, as in a shot of two middle-age, well-dressed black and white men at an outdoor fair, whose postures suggest two people at odds, each moving in their own contrary direction. The image, from 1959, is called “Going Separate Ways,” and it seems to comment upon race in a glancing, subtle way.

“Visione” will surely be heartening to other artists who have pursued their passion while nurturing families and careers and see the years accumulated in a satisfying body of work.