Denver | SOCIOLOGRAPHY

After filling 2010 and 2011 with travel, I changed gears in 2012 to spend most of the year in Chicago working on two local projects.

The first was the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation supported To be Demolished series, in which I photographed 100 buildings threatened with demolition throughout the city. Among my goals for the project was to get a sense of the range of buildings lost, from minor buildings receiving no public attention to those in the limelight. The full series is viewable on Gapers Block, and you can read more about it in this column by Mary Schmich.

The second Chicago project was the simultaneous undertaking of my dissertation and a documentary film about a group of South Side Chicago residents who are being displaced. I will be posting more about that work within a month; in the meantime, here are a few frames from the film. Update: The film is now online, and I’ve included it above the screenshots.

While the local initiatives kept me busy, I still found time to extend projects in Belfast, Northern Ireland and nine other U.S. cities. I visited Belfast to continue documenting the activities of Eleventh Night and The Twelfth, and most of the U.S. visits were structured around wrapping up the fieldwork component of my collaborative effort with Michael Carriere, which I’ve previously mentioned on the blog and was written up in The Atlantic Cities.

Below I present a selection of photographs from most of those cities, alongside a few more from the Chicago area.

Elsewhere in the Chicago Region

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Indianapolis, Indiana

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Last week I traveled to Denver, Colorado to attend the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting and to continue my work on creative grassroots responses to urban problems. The conference and Denver kept me busy, but I was also fortunate to have an extra day to make a supplementary trip to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

During the visit, I was struck by how each state capital was defined by its history as an important thoroughfare. While both were enhanced by 19th century Western expansion, they have been more recently and visibly affected by transcontinental automobile traffic; for Denver, it was U.S. Highway 40 and, later, Interstate-70, for Cheyenne, it was the Lincoln Highway and, later, Interstate-80. The corresponding mid-century development framed my experience of both places, where I often focused on place, commerce and transportation. So while I photographed throughout both cities, I’ve primarily selected related sample images below.

As always, click on the city titles to see other selected images I posted to flickr.

Denver, Colorado