Tag Archives: Massachusetts

Two Years in Massachusetts

June 19, 2016 David Schalliol

From Two Years Overlooking MIT, 2013-2015

From 2013 to 2015 I split my time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Chicago. Rather than work on a major project in the Boston area, I mainly used my time there to write my dissertation and focus other projects, including organizing and editing my work for Affordable Housing in New York and the Telescope Houses of Buffalo, New York. Even so, I did produce a small photographic series about modernist buildings, wandered around in the greatest snowfall in the city’s history, and made a little work that helped me enjoy some of the differences between New England and Midwestern cities.

The following photographs are a loose assortment from those mini-projects. The above image pulls from the dozens of photographs I made from the apartment window. MIT’s Briggs Field commands the foreground, with the rest of the campus, the Charles River, and Boston beyond.

Walking home through the Allston neighborhood

Josep Lluís Sert’s Peabody Terrace in context

Forth of July along the Charles River

Cambridge in the snow

The landmarked [pdf] Shell Oil Company “Spectacular” sign in Cambridge

St Augustine’s African Orthodox Pro-Cathedral in Cambridge. The denomination was founded in Chicago in 1921 and has an intriguing history, including links to Marcus Garvey.

In the fall, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus rolls into the Boston area and sides in Cambridge tracks.

A view of the Boston skyline from across the harbor in Jeffries Point

Providence-based What Cheer? in a Honk Fest parking garage

Three photographs from a small project on Cambridgeport, a low-density Cambridge neighborhood that’s being rapidly densified

Boston’s Government Service Center at dusk

Eero Sarrinen’s MIT Chapel and a peculiar Allston residential building

Perhaps the brashest (and ugliest) building addition I’ve ever seen

A view of the Boston’s layered skyline from North End Park

Photograph, Text

Another Year, Another City

January 4, 2016 David Schalliol 2 Comments

2015 was another year of change. After splitting my time in Chicago and Cambridge over the last couple of years, it’s time to add another city into the mix. Since August, I have been hopping between Chicago and Minneapolis, where I am now an assistant professor of sociology at St. Olaf College. Even with the change in location, I’ve actively worked on several projects, including two which have come to a close. The following includes highlights from that work and a few notes about what I’ll be up to in 2016.

PROJECTS

The Affordable Housing of New York City, New York

Among the most exciting developments of 2015 was the publication of Affordable Housing in New York, edited by Matthew Lasner and Nicholas Bloom. I contributed a photography essay and dozens of additional images to the book. The project extends my work on public housing in Chicago and can be read as a companion to my efforts with Devereux Bowly on the revised and expanded edition of The Poorhouse. Samples from the project can be seen in a New York Times feature and an upcoming exhibition at Hunter East Harlem, details forthcoming.

The Area

Four years into the displacement of more than 400 families by an intermodal freight yard project, few residents remain in “The Area.” Instead, the community better resembles a worksite than a neighborhood. After a productive editing period in 2014, we put editing on hold for the year while I continued to work with residents who have both stayed and settled elsewhere. Even so, the rough-cut material was shown at a couple of events, with more scheduled for 2016. In the spring, I presented a small sample of the material at the Place Hacking Sociology conference at the University of Liverpool, and David Weinberg Photography hosted the first public screening of material from the film as part of its An Invisible Hand exhibition. The Weinberg screening was particularly special, as community activist Deborah Payne was present for the Q&A. I expect we will return to post-production work later in 2016.

The Bloomingdale Trail

In 2009, Paul Smith, Ben Helphand, and I held several conversations that would ultimately result in developing the few images I’d made on the nascent Bloomingdale Trail into a project that I would pursue for the next six years. Now that the underused rail spur has been transformed by its own multi-year construction project, I am concluding the series. I’m sure I will continue to spend time on the Trail, but any future work will be a coda to a project about a semi-wild, semi-public place above Chicago’s near northwest side.

Buffalo, New York Telescope Houses

I am nearly three years into working on this small typological project about one of Buffalo’s vernacular architectural modes, the telescope house. Now that I have photographed nearly five dozen of the buildings, I have begun to exhibit the work. This year, I exhibited selections from the project at pinkcomma gallery in Boston, as well as published in Satellite magazine and ArchDaily. An exhibition dedicated to the series will be shown this spring in Dennis Maher’s Fargo House gallery in Buffalo.

OTHER CITIES

As in previous years, I visited a couple of dozen cities in the United States, much of it in support of my now six-year book project with Michael Carriere about creative solutions to local social problems. Below are photographs from some of those visits, as well as a few from a short trip to Norway and Sweden.

Amsterdam, New York

Boston, Massachusetts

Buffalo, New York

Cambridge, Massachusetts

In Cambridge, I spent a lot of time treading around during the area’s greatest recorded snowfall.

Chicago, Illinois

Cleveland, Ohio

Detroit, Michigan

In 2014, I posted a photograph of Tyree Guyton’s House of Soul, which had been burned by an arsonist that year. The image on the left is the replacement, as of winter 2015.

Houston, Texas

In Houston, I worked on a small project about development in the city’s Third Ward.

Indianapolis, Indiana

Göteborg, Sweden

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I haven’t yet started a formal project in Minneapolis, but I am exploring the city. Now that the weather has turned, I’m especially looking forward to photographing in the snow and cold.

Oslo, Norway

Racine, Wisconsin

St. Paul, Minnesota

Stockholm, Sweden

Waugh, Indiana

To 2016!

Uncategorized

95 Inches of Snow

February 18, 2015 David Schalliol 2 Comments

This time last year, I was engulfed by the Polar Vortex in Chicago, but this year I am in the Boston area for its record snowfall. The region has received nearly 8 feet (2.4 meters) of snow in the last few weeks, and additional precipitation is forecast. Unfortunately, the area’s public transportation infrastructure is woefully underprepared for the deluge, and many municipalities don’t know where to put all of the snow; Boston has even considered dumping it in the harbor. Even so, the accumulation makes for a fresh landscape and is especially peaceful on Cambridge’s side streets at night.

Photograph, Text

Another Year of Projects and A Little Travel

January 4, 2015 David Schalliol 1 Comment

Even more than 2013, I spent 2014 working on projects, including the films Almost There and The Area, and photography series about subsidized housing in New York City and Japan’s Tōhoku region. When not working on those projects, I continued to travel through the United States, often to work on my ongoing collaboration with Michael Carriere at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Below, I have included sample photographs from those projects, alongside supplementary images I made in many of the cities I visited throughout the year. As always, you can click through most of the photographs to view them on flickr, alongside many other everyday images.

PROJECTS

Almost There

In 2013, I produced a body of work as Environmental Cinematographer for the ITVS/Kartemquin Films project Almost There. After a year of post-production work, the film made its world premiere at DOCNYC in November. It has since screened at ArcLight Hollywood, and its Chicago premiere will be on January 10, 2015 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Watch for it on PBS later this year.

The Area

I continue to busily work on The Area, alongside editors Brian Ashby and Peter Galassi from Scrappers Film Group. Thanks to the support from the Graham Foundation, the Driehaus Foundation, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, we produced more than three hours of edited footage last summer and are preparing for another round of editing early in 2015. Still, I am not done with the project and expect to be filming into 2015. If you are interested in reading about the project, I continue to write a column addressing some of the pertinent issues for BAG News. My next piece will be published in the next few weeks, although you can always check in at the film’s website for updates.

The Subsidized Housing of New York City, New York

This fall I worked on a documentary photography project about subsidized housing in New York that included everything from historic cooperative developments to the public housing projects of the New York City Housing Authority. I will provide more details about that series when it is published as part of a book project next year. In the meantime, I’ve included two images below.

Japan

At the beginning of 2014 I flew to Japan for an exhibition of the Isolated Building Studies at Gallery Tanto Tempo, which led to the publication of Isolated Building Studies by UTAKATADO Publishing. Following my time in Kobe, I visited other cities before heading into Tōhoku, the Japanese region critically affected by the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster. Several photographs from the visit are below, and I wrote a lengthy summary of the experience last January.

Cars Upturned by Tsunami, Downtown Tomioka

The Post-Tsunami Site of the Ogatsucho Mizuhama Town Center

Ishinomaki from Above, with Reconstruction Underway

OTHER UNITED STATES CITIES

Bay Area, California

Buffalo, New York

In 2013, I created a small project about Buffalo’s telescope houses, and I continued to work on the project in 2014. The following set of night photographs is a sample of the material I made to extend the earlier work.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

While I have been mainly using my time in Cambridge to write, I have been working on a small project about the neighborhood of Cambridgeport.

Chicago, Illinois

In addition to working on The Area and a set of photographs from this year’s polar vortex, I continue to work on a broad body of work about Chicago, from general views of daily urban life to documenting specific events like the Luftwerk/Mas Context installation at Marina City.

Cleveland, Ohio

I am working on a typology of post-war residential buildings in the Cleveland area.

Detroit, Michigan

Although I have slowed working on my seven-year project about the Detroit, Michigan area, I still made a few trips to the city.

Los Angeles, California

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Minneapolis, Minnesota

New York City, New York

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and its River Towns

I was happy to have enough time in the Pittsburgh area to produce a small project along the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers.

Providence, Rhode Island

St. Louis, Missouri

I was only in St. Louis for a couple of days, but I was excited to be able to snap this aerial image of Granite City, Illinois.

To 2015!

Photograph, Text

A Year of Projects and More Travel

January 1, 2014 David Schalliol 1 Comment

2013 was yet another year of big changes: I finished my fieldwork for my dissertation; I started regularly spending time in both Chicago and Cambridge, Massachusetts; and I started a major shift in the balance of my photographic and video work.

In previous years, I pursued a relatively equal combination of project and non-project work. Typically, that’s meant spending as much time developing formal projects as more loosely exploring a given city. This year, I have been so busy with the formal projects that I have had much less time to “just” explore.

I worked on the documentary film (still tentatively called “The Area”) more than any other project, although I even shifted that balance. I was visiting the neighborhood nearly every day for the first half of the year, but I am now visiting in concentrated chunks. I dedicated much of the time I would have spent in the neighborhood to either writing about the project or initiating post-production work with Scrappers Film Group. If you would like to read some of my writing about the project, I have been authoring a column about the work for BagNewsOriginals. If you haven’t seen the documentary short from the project, you can view it on Gapers Block.

Of the other projects, two of my favorites were documenting Bertrand Goldberg‘s Prentice Women’s Hospital and contributing to the Kartemquin Film’s Almost There. While Prentice’s magnificent exterior presented the usual opportunities and difficulties involved with documenting buildings, the interior documentation was particularly challenging. By the time our team was allowed access to the building, Northwestern University had already begun some elements of the demolition, and the many of the floors lacked electricity for anything other than emergency lighting. Still, the experience was unforgettable, and I am happy with the work we produced. Hopefully the next building will be saved.

I’ve included example photographs from those projects below, along with selected images from my visits to other U.S. cities. You can click through for larger versions of the images on flickr (except for the Prentice images) and can click on the titles to see other blog posts or flickr sets.

The Area