Photographs of Chicago.

For this blog entry, I visited three image sites featuring Chicago as their subject.

First up is the site Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait by Terry Evans. This is a collection of photographs taken from the air all around Chicagoland. The pictures are subdivided into themes: the lakefront, commerce and culture, infrastructure, city neighborhoods, chilling out, suburbs, farming, saved places in addition to maps showing the extent to which humans have changed the landscape in the past 200 years.
The concept behind taking aerial pictures is not unique to Evans but it is quite well executed. These photographs allowed me to see places from a vantage point that is not readily available. The varied themes create a breadth and scope that is hard to summarize but includes everything from run down, empty lots on the West Side to carefully manicured private yards in the northwest suburbs to a golf course built on a former landfill to a yard where containers are transferred from boats to trains and/or trucks. Captions are another strength of the website as I was not aware that "Chicago is the third largest intermodal port in the world, behind Singapore and Hong Kong." Most striking is the relative absence of people from the photographs, rendered insignificant by the distance between an aircraft and the ground. However, the effect of man upon the landscape is readily apparent- even in the section devoted to protected lands.

Next up is Picturing Chicago, an ongoing project by Carla G. Surratt. It is quite an ambitious overview of the city shot in stark black and white and more often than not focusing solely on the landscape (whether artificial or natural but mostly man-made). I did not have the patience to look at all of the photographs but they are very good at capturing the architectural and spatial integrity of the city and will undoubtedly serve as a great resource on the city of Chicago at the turn of the 21st Century.

For seeing pictures of the past is far more interesting than seeing pictures of places that you see regularly and are downright pedestrian as a result. The Chicago Imagebase, though fraught with broken links and pages in construction, is a collection of images within Chicagoland from the 19th Century to the present. These pictures come from varying sources but seem much more interesting to me, for the reasons I already mentioned.

As far as the pictures I enjoy taking within the city, I would have to say that I once approached it from the purely landscape based mindset that Picturing Chicago seems to take but grew increasingly bored with the compositions that resulted from it. What did I turn to? I modified it to include people, though not in the tourist "look-I-went-to-Millenium-Park" sense but rather of people milling around in their everyday business. This is much more easily achievable in Chicago between April and November as you can imagine...