Rachel M. Wolfe
April 6, 2010
I enjoy the way Rachel M. Wolfe sees the mundane things in life. Nice color, pleasant tone — simple. She lives and works in Chicago. (I think)
Loop Sessions — Early March
March 14, 2010
I spend all week in the Loop nowadays. It’s wild and I’m tame as of yet. My time down there will no doubt change me—I’ll grow, I’ll shrink, I’ll come to love some things and hate others. Being in such a dense and busy place like the Loop teaches me a lot about myself and slowly shapes my worldview.
I take my Leica every day and go for an hour long walk during the lunch-hour. North, South, East and West—each has a distinct flavor—I’m pretty much in the middle.
My ambition is to post a lot of work in the coming months. I want to look back at the archive as it grows and see how I’ve grown. I process the film at home in the kitchen (I’m working on enhancing my comprehension of the zone system). My goal is to make rapid strides in understanding how to make a perfect negative and how to produce a dynamic print from it. My guess would be that in half a year of shooting during lunch, I’ll come out with a dozen photographs that have legs to stand on.
Lizzy Hazle and I, (she also works in the Loop) intend to create some sort of limited-edition publication/print-package/thingamajig that will evolve out of time spent working in the Loop and perhaps more specifically on Wabash Avenue. There is a madness down there, which is sometimes also serene and we think it’d be nice to capture a bit of it in order to share and look at more closely.
But as you know, talk is cheap so I guess only time will tell–
01. Miscellaneous Zone Tests
02. The Windy City
03. Credit Moves the Modern Business World
04. The Chicago Board of Trade
05. Kinzie Street Railroad Bridge
06. The Universe Inside a Lobby
07. Noon-time Glider
08. State Street
09. New Line Tavern
10. In Between the Lines
Leaf Bird
January 27, 2010
I love this song by Leaf Bird. I went to high school with Tyler and Lola at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. It’s easy to spend more than a few hours looping their MySpace playlist.
They’ve got a record coming out soon. You can keep your eye out for shows and the record release by visiting their MySpace or Facebook page.
Really beautiful work!
Mysterious Vivian Maier
November 3, 2009
Vivian Maier is a street photographer from the 1950s – 1970s. Her work was discovered at an auction in Chicago where she lived for 50 years. Her discovered work includes between 30-40,000 medium format negatives of which many have been scanned and posted to the fascinating daily page that bears her name. A wonderful way to lose an hour or two…
Trying to Escape
October 16, 2009
As brief as it is, I am beginning a new project and this is the first piece I’ve completed.
The Cook County Law Library — Mies van der Rohe
September 16, 2009
By some uncertain stroke of luck I was able to visit the Cook County Law Library with my camera in hand. This morning’s visit is proof again that smiling and saying “please” can get you anything you want. I was told by the first batch of guardsmen that I spoke to that cameras were officiously forbidden. Perseverence prevailed.
Nearly every image turned out well—you couldn’t make a bad composition with all those wonderful lines and the plentiful natural light!
The building, built by none other than Mies van der Rohe is an impressive specimen of mid twentieth-century modernism. I have criticized the building in the past for its anti-humanist qualities, but today I changed my mind.
Loop in the A.M. — sun in the East
September 16, 2009
I rode the El down into the Loop at the crack of dawn this morning in order to arrive in time to make use of the rising sun. It was a very productive several hours—having found a handful of elevated vantage points from which to scour the city with my camera. The photos are mainly for a website currently in development, though I was having perhaps too much fun to think of it as work.
It’s called the magic hour for a reason.