Tag Archives: photography

Sears appliance circular does strange things to the Chicago skyline

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It is not too unusual for cities to be misrepresented in movies or television shows but this takes place in other areas as well. A Sears advertising circular from Friday, September 9, takes some interesting liberties with the Chicago skyline. Take a look:

Perhaps this looks fairly standard: the Sears logo in the top left, a “big price drop” balloon coming down from the sky in the upper right corner, six appliances on sale, and then a picture of the Chicago skyline at the bottom. While this may be just pandering to this metropolitan region, it also hints at Sears’ history: the first Sears store opened in Chicago in 1925 and their headquarters are still in the region.

But if you look more closely at the skyline picture, two strange things pop up. The first: a green lawn. Here is a close-up of the bottom left of the circular:

This green view is pretty much impossible. To get a wide view of the skyline from this angle, one needs to be at the Adler Planetarium promontory. From there, one needs to stand either on a hill sloping down, meaning the lawn is difficult to get into the shot, or from the concrete steps or walkway that go around this point. Plus, the grass is pretty high here relative to the height of the buildings. So why include the grass? It would make some sense if the circular was advertising lawn mowers – but it is not. Perhaps the “big price drop” balloon needs a safe place to land. Or the circular needs a touch of pleasing green. Or a focus group suggested the green lawn invokes images of home life, the need for beautiful appliances, and the American Dream.

In addition to the strange grass, there is something odd going on at the right (east) side of the skyline. Here is a closer view:

Even looking closely at the circular, I have a hard time figuring out what is going on here. It appears to be a hill sloping up from the lake with some buildings on the hill. Why was this added to the picture? I really have no good idea – to fill up space?

Here is what the view of the Chicago skyline looks like from my own camera near Adler Planetarium, sans verdant lawn or black hill:

If this was the starting point for the Sears image, one could crop and play with it in such a way that the added blue from Lake Michigan could be removed but adding the lawn and hill is not necessary. It would still be a very nice and useful shot.

Photos of “unique” Lakewood, California

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The New York Times takes a look at some of the photographs Tom M. Johnson has taken of his hometown, Lakewood, California. Here is how Johnson describes his pictures:

At a workshop in Santa Fe, N.M., Mr. Johnson learned of three steps for becoming a successful artist, ascribed to Horton Foote: Be competent at your medium, understand the history of your medium and come from a place.

“I thought about that driving on the way home,” he said. “I started thinking about Lakewood. This is sort of a unique suburb. I started to appreciate the qualities.”

Mr. Johnson’s parents moved to Lakewood in the 1950s. It was his mother’s dream home. At that time, he said, Lakewood was largely composed of a single middle-class stratum. Now, he said, even as the definition of “middle class” has broadened, so has the mix in Lakewood, where you can find run-down homes as well as manicured lawns.

Mr. Johnson is changing, too. “I see different types of pictures than I did before,” he said. “It’s probably something I’ll continue to work on forever.”

This sounds like it could be interesting: an artist realizes that his unique hometown has a lot of potential. But, looking at these 13 photos on the NYT website, I don’t really see much of the uniqueness of Lakewood at all. In fact, I think these photos could come from a number of suburbs. Maybe I think this just because of the 13 photos offered here.

Lakewood does have the potential to be an interesting subject. Here is a brief history of the community:

Lakewood is a planned, post-World War II community. Developers Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart are credited with “altering forever the map of Southern California”. Begun in late 1949, the completion of the developers’ plan in 1953 helped in the transformation of mass-produced working-class housing from its early phases in the 1930s and 1940s to the reality of the 1950s. The feel of this transformation from the point of view of a resident growing up in Lakewood was captured by D. J. Waldie in his award-winning memoir, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.

Lakewood’s primary thoroughfares are mostly boulevards with landscaped medians, with frontage roads on either side in residential districts. Unlike in most similar configurations, however, access to the main road from the frontage road is only possible from infrequently spaced collector streets. This arrangement, hailed by urban planners of the day, is a compromise between the traditional urban grid and the arrangement of winding “drives” and culs-de-sac that dominates contemporary suburban and exurban design.

It might be difficult to take photos of “boulevards with landscaped medians” or convey the spirit of “mass-produced working-class housing” but, if this is what sets Lakewood apart, these are the photos I would like to see.

In general, it may be difficult to convey the unique character that individual suburbs have. While residents and community leaders certainly know what sets their community apart from nearby communities, picking this out in photographs may be a challenge.

Dioramas of suburbs and McMansions

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The New York Times has a story about photographers who build model homes and suburban scenes in order to photograph them:

Yet “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, circles back to the two-dimensional image in ways that feel very sophisticated. A good number of the show’s more than 40 artists build model homes, cities and landscapes mainly to photograph them…

James Casebere, meanwhile, shows his photographs but not the architectural models of suburban housing developments on which they are based. By controlling the lighting and printing his images on a large scale, he makes sprawl seem even more aggressive and insidious. In “Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, N.Y.) #8” tightly spaced McMansions tower over a quaint white-clapboard farmhouse.

Mr. Casebere is something of an anomaly in this show because he is so focused on the present. Other examples of model architecture tend to indulge nostalgia, along the lines of Michael Paul Smith’s bland 1950s strip mall and Alan Wolfson’s gritty little slice of 1970s Canal Street in New York…

The trip through all of these microcosms can be tedious: too many shoeboxes, not enough ideas. One exception is a video by Junebum Park, who uses his hands and a rooftop camera to turn an ordinary parking lot into a kind of moving diorama. A simple trick of perspective is all it takes to make him the master of Matchbox cars and ant-size pedestrians.

The article ends by suggesting that too many of the dioramas are similar. What would happen if an artist presented suburban homes in a positive light rather than portraying sprawl as “aggressive and insidious” – would this be different enough or unacceptable?

I am intrigued by the idea that a “bland” 1950s strip mall induces nostalgia. What exactly does this look like?

Putting together sociology and art in an old Brazilian chocolate factory

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Sociology is a field of study that can be paired with a lot of other disciplines. For example, combining sociology with art can lead to some interesting outcomes, including this example of a photographer working with families that moved into an old chocolate factory in Brazil:

Eight years ago, 60 families occupied the “Galpao da Araujo Barreto,” an abandoned chocolate factory in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Prior to setting up in this place, these families lived on the city’s dangerous streets.

Since 2009, I have been documenting the factory. From my studies in sociology, I understood that this was a unique community: Here was a large sub-culture within the city that behaved as one extended family. They built a microcosm in which the problems of drugs, prostitution and violence are tackled with the support of the community.

Sebastian Liste, 26, is a photographer currently living between Brazil and Spain. He is focused in developing long-term projects that mix his unique visual approach with his background in sociology to explore personal and intimate stories.

It would be interesting to hear Liste describe further how sociology better helps him understand this community and his art. It seems that sociology and art can often have the same ends: the betterment of society. This is achieved in different ways.  Art seeks to tell more stories or expose the conditions of people. Liste’s pictures on this particular webpage humanize these Brazilians who live in somewhat unusual conditions within an old factory. Sociology looks for data and theories that shed light on how to tackle social problems and in this situation could provide insights into the structural position of this group within Brazilian society and how their interactions benefit or hinder the social advancement of the group. Put together, photographs could reveal how this group moves forward in a post-industrial world (evidenced by the old factory) through human bonds that have now been separated (to some degree) from former lives on “dangerous streets.”

Shuttering harassment of photographers

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The New York Times’ Lens Blog is reporting that the Department of Homeland Security has recently issued a directive reminding its officers “of the public’s general right to photograph the exteriors” of federal buildings:

The three-page bulletin reminds officers, agents and employees that, “absent reasonable suspicion or probable cause,” they “must allow individuals to photograph the exterior of federally owned or leased facilities from publicly accessible spaces” like streets, sidewalks, parks and plazas. Even when there seems to be reason to intercede and conduct a “field interview,” the directive says:

Officers should not seize the camera or its contents, and must be cautious not to give such ‘orders’ to a photographer to erase the contents of a camera, as this constitutes a seizure or detention.

As an avid photographer, this warms my heart.  I remember attempting to photograph the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) in downtown Chicago a few years after 9/11 during an architectural photoshoot of the loop and being chased away by security guards who claimed I could not take pictures from the public sidewalks.  Personally, I haven’t run into too much opposition since then, but it will be nice to have documentation of my photographic rights on my person when I’m out shooting photos.

Lightning strikes Chicago

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A large storm blew through Chicago on Wednesday, June 23. A photographer caught lightning hitting the Trump Tower and the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) in the same image.

Nature vs. humanity’s skyscrapers.