Adventures in being me
As usual, here’s a map of the day’s walk.
Not much to say, really – still trying to find a focus for the project. Right now I’m leaning towards distilling five-six themes and exploring them in depth in five clearly defined locations in the city. But I have a feeling I need to get out more with a completely open attitude first. As always, suggestions and comments welcome.
One thing has become very apparent to me since I started photographing Chicago alleys: in residential neighborhoods, most of the really interesting stuff takes place in private areas. This means I will have to a more active approach to accessing these spaces than I was hoping to. At first I thought that as long as I have to get access, maybe the thing to do would be to show the alley actually being used – so far the pictures have been about the material makeup of the place, with the social dimension represented only through inanimate objects. However, in the end that would have become a very work-intensive digression from the architectural aspect of the project, which was my ambition for it from the beginning, and still is. So for now I have decided to keep things simple and on track, by concentrating on the built environment of the alley zone, even as I get deeper into it.
Another, which is kind of a ‘duh’ moment for a photographer, is that the light quality matters more than I previously thought. On the one hand, in photographing at dawn and dusk, I got a flatter light quality that allowed me to concentrate on the objects themselves instead of the light play on them. However, the photographs themselves become flat and less engaging than ones shot during the day under typical lighting conditions. I still haven’t resolved this issue, though now I’m leaning towards dealing with the photography on its own merits and then approaching the objective qualities of the environment through analytic drawings.
First, let me explain that I’m really using the “Chicago alley” as shorthand for everything outside and beyond the representative facades of buildings. Where the street frontage represents the social aspirations of its builders and inhabitants, the alley shows their everyday practical needs and desires. This is the world of decks, trinkets, exposed wiring sneaking loosely to where it’s needed. It’s the world of fences, trash cans and basketball hoops. This is where Chicagoans relax and play, and this is where they feel comfortable. In fact, the architecture of the alley is the architecture of comfort, more often than not to the exclusion of “good” taste. Still, the mixture is a potent visual feast of winding porch stairs, room additions, deck furniture and lawn fixtures. It’s the ultimate functionalist fantasy land of day-to-day human desires.
In fact, my fascination with the alley goes back many years. The alley was where as a kid you could find the most interesting stuff – it may have been gross at times, but it wasn’t manicured and “fake”. It was real. Where the street was nice and to a large extent uniform, the alley showed the glorious variety of its inhabitants. There was no overt attempt at uniformity there – one yard had tomato plants, another was a lounge, yet another might be somebody’s storage pile. Larger buildings were more orderly – but the porches never attempted to keep a straight line from building to building, and their inhabitants’ stuff tended to accumulate enough to provide a fascinating display. Variety was the name of the game.
Even formally the alley is more interesting than the street. The “alley zone”, taken to include exterior areas behind building facades, is just as “thick” as the “street zone”, and much more complex:
Of course this is a typical residential block, and the city’s alleys are as varied as its neighborhoods. Downtown the proportions are shifted towards the street, with the surrounding buildings squeezing the alleys nearly out of existence. Others, depending on interpretation, might be mostly “alley” – here some of the South Side’s blighted areas come to mind. Still, however you see it, the alley and its attendant areas are worth a look. And that’s what this whole project is going to be about.
Today, the West Loop, between Peoria and Halsted, from Harrison to Grand.
