Tag Archives: Minneapolis

Old Projects, New Phases

After years of steadily developing several long-term projects, 2018 was the year many of them dramatically changed. The Area is out in the world; my Hauts-de-France work is exhibiting; so many other projects are evolving. With those big changes in mind, here’s a recap of my work on major projects in 2018, a few highlights from smaller projects, and a little looking ahead to 2019.

The Area Film

After six years of work, The Area is screening. Since premiering at the Full Frame Film Festival in April and making its Chicago premiere at the Black Harvest Film Festival in August, we’ve been busy screening the film with an amazing set of partners, including the Metropolitan Planning Council, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the National Public Housing Museum, universities, community organizing groups, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. To learn more about screenings, news, and requesting a screening, visit The Area’s website.

At the Black Harvest Film Festival

Black Harvest Film Festival Black Harvest Film Festival
Full Frame Film Festival Black Harvest Film Festival

Hauts-de-France Mining Basin and the Resilient Images Residency

Following a preview at Expo Chicago and multiple exhibitions in France in 2017, my Resilient Images work had its full exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2018. In June, a subset of the project returned to France for exhibition during the national urban planning conference RDV avec la Ville. I made some new work during the June visit, so I’m not quite ready to call the project complete, but I’m pleased with it and where it’s going.

Installation of Hauts-de-France Mining Basin

Cité Werth à Denain

Bean Creek in Indianapolis, Indiana

Over the last few years, I’ve been steadily developing a project in Indianapolis with support from Big Car. I tightened the work in 2018 by emphasizing how the south side neighborhood has evolved with small creek that winds through the community. The first exhibition from that residency will appear at the Tube Factory Art Space next year. The show focuses on the relationship between people and place, and puts the Bean Creek work in dialogue with my projects in The Area and Hauts-de-France. More information about the exhibition is on facebook.

Bean Creek

With a Stray Dog Strike Fear or Get Struck

Urban Farming in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The national placemaking project Michael Carriere and I started back in 2009 is shifting from research to public engagement, with a second exhibition prepared and the book moving towards publication. In January, our exhibition Growing Place: A Visual Study of Urban Farming is opening at the Grohmann Art Museum, which situates Milwaukee’s contemporary urban farming movement in its history, drawing from archival photographs, documents, and contemporary artifacts. I’m especially excited about the programing we’re scheduling, including events with the Walnut Way Conservation Corps, Will Allen, and others. More details forthcoming!

Urban Farm Aerial

Hmong Farmer at Fondy Market

Belfast, Northern Ireland

As I wrote earlier in the year, I made my fourth visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland in July to continue documenting the changing experience of Eleventh Night and The Twelfth. Among the new work I made this year was an aerial sub-project about the aftermath of the bonfires, which helps orient the work away from the specific moment of the events.

Burning the Children's Bonfire

Bonfire Aftermath from Above

Rebuilding in Tōhoku, Japan

Last week I returned from Tōhoku, Japan, where I continued my work on the rebuilding process after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. I’ll be sharing more photographs in the next few weeks, but here are two favorite rephotography sequences and a building happily back in use in Ishinomaki. The rebuilding process is somehow overwhelmingly fast and slow.

2014, 2016, 2018

2014, 2016, 2018

Two Buildings

SKETCHES FROM ELSEWHERE

Camden, New Jersey

In Camden, New Jersey

Camden, New Jersey to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Chicago, Illinois Region

Valentines in Whiting, Indiana

Iced Tree on Lake Michigan

Dublin, Ireland

The Gasworks

Ely, Minnesota

Ely

New Orleans, Louisiana

Ashton Theater

Paris, France Region

Les Espaces d'Abraxas

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Pool at the Row House

Reykjavik, Iceland Region

Icelandic Geothermal Pool

Hallgrimskirkja

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Camera Shop

San Diego, California Region

Solana Beach Transit Center

San Diego County Fair

Seattle, Washington

Oxbow Park

Olive Tower

St. Louis, Missouri

IMG_4606_7

Stockholm, Sweden

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Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo from Above

Isolated Tokyo

To 2019!

2016 in Review: Nearly As Much There As Here

2016 was another year of travel, but unlike previous years, my explorations were more international than domestic: for more than two months I made work in Belgium, Ethiopia, France, Ireland, Japan, Northern Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates.

One month of that period was for a residency in the North of France and Belgium. The residency, “Resilient Images,” is a joint program launched by the Hyde Park Art Center and the Centre régional de la photographie Nord—Pas-de-Calais and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the French Embassy, and Institut Français. I will be writing more about my project in a few months, but if you’re interested in learning a little more about what I’m doing in the North, you can read a little more about it in this short interview. The rest of the summer, I continued my project about Eleventh Night and the Twelfth in Belfast, photographed in Tōhoku and showed photographs at Gallery Tanto Tempo in Japan, toured Ethiopia with friends, and visited with guest workers in Dubai.

But I also did some domestic travel, including for a show in Buffalo, New York at Dennis Maher’s incomparable Fargo House and a screening of scenes from The Area at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Mobile Design Box in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I also made brief visits to the area around Louisville, Kentucky and New Orleans, Louisiana. Of course, I spent plenty of time in Chicago, Illinois and Minneapolis, Minnesota, which finally feels like home.

The other big project news is that after nearly five years, The Area is swiftly moving towards completion with Scrappers Film Group after a party and fundraiser in December. “Thank you,” everyone who attended and contributed!

I can’t possibly do justice to the places I visited in this short post, but I’ve included links to locations for which I made blog posts, and posted a few photographs from each site. If I authored a blog post about a particular visit, the section title is a link to the post.

To 2017! It’s going to be a busy one, isn’t it?

Resilient Images Residency in Hauts-de-France, France

Watching, Power Plant
Residents calling for their dog from their street.

Gathering to Depart
ATV riders gather to move from one part of a slag heap to another.


Coal cars displayed in former mining towns.

Belgium

Playing Soccer in Molenbeek
Young immigrants play soccer in Brussels’ Molenbeek neighborhood.

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Igniting the Children's Bonfire
Shankill neighborhood residents ignite their children’s bonfire.

Tōhoku, Japan

CU9I4862 Update
Post-tsunami and radiation contamination remediation in downtown Tomioka.

The “Jungle,” Calais, France

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The formal and informal Calais “Jungle” camps before demolition.

Ethiopia

IMG_5846
Two boys look down to their village in rural Tigray.

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A minibus stop and an outdoor pool hall in Addis Ababa.

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The Church of St. George in Lalibela.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

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Scrappers remove kitchen counters from a partially demolished house.

Trucks
A small sample of the variety of modified truck designs in sand parking lots.

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Two Pakistani guest workers and the largest Tim Horton’s advertisement I’ve ever seen.

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo Telescope Houses
Six new telescope house photographs I made while visiting for my exhibition.

Chicago, Illinois

IMG_8928
The beginning of the Scrappers Film Group party and fundraiser for The Area at Lost Arts.

Leaning
A leaning, isolated building near the former United States Steel South Works site.

Louisville, Kentucky

Overlooking the Ohio River
Overlooking the Ohio River and Louisville, Kentucky from Jeffersonville, Indiana.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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A major clean-up effort in a North Side neighborhood.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

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The Minnehaha Free Space before it was displaced by a new landlord.

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A former entry area of the Minneapolis Scottish Rite Temple.

New Orleans, Louisiana

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Four teenagers posing outside a corner store in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Rural Minnesota

National Farmer's Bank of Owatonna
Louis Sullivan’s National Farmer's Bank of Owatonna.

Rural Wisconsin

Woodside Place
A former church in St. Croix.

Another Year, Another City

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.

Melrose Commons - El Jardin de Seline Interior: Thomas Morales and Luis Franco

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.

Leaving Home

Walking to Play Basketball

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.

The Bloomingdale Trail

At the Eastern Terminus Looking East from the

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.

Buffalo Telescope Houses

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

Residential Block, (Former) Fownes Brothers Glove Factory

Boston, Massachusetts

North End Park, Boston Skyline

Buffalo, New York

Alfy's Mini Mart

Cambridge, Massachusetts

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

Cambridge Street After the Blizzard

Chicago, Illinois

Root Inn Liquors

Cleveland, Ohio

City of Cleveland, Do Not Cut Grass

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.

New House of Soul Senate Theater, Detroit

Houston, Texas

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

New Construction, Third Ward

Indianapolis, Indiana

Sitting on the Porch, Reading

Göteborg, Sweden

Sauna in Frihamnen (Bathing Culture Göteborg)

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Corner, Looking Out

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.

Scene of a South Minneapolis Shooting Lake Ice Hockey

House, Charles Horn Towers

Oslo, Norway

Oslo Street in the Snow, Uranienborg Church

Racine, Wisconsin

Office

St. Paul, Minnesota

Parade View: Black Lives Matter St. Paul

Stockholm, Sweden

Stockholm at Dawn

Waugh, Indiana

Movie Projected on the Barn, Indiana

To 2016!

Another Year of Projects and A Little Travel

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.

Demolition on Garfield

Untitled

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.

Markham Gardens Kids Walking Through Buildings

Co-op City

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
Trucks Along the River Ishinomaki from Above, with Reconstruction Underway

Aoyama Kitamachi Danchi

OTHER UNITED STATES CITIES

Bay Area, California

George's Market, Haircuts Today

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.

Buffalo, New York Telescope Houses at Night

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.

First United Mkt

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.

Streetlight, In the Snow

Sleeping (on the) Job

Luftwerk's Installation at Marina City, Presented by Mas Context

Cleveland, Ohio

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

Post-War Suburban Homes

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.

Ride It Sculpture Park

Los Angeles, California

Los Angeles

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

El Alfarero Iglesia Apostolica

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Suburban Minneapolis

New York City, New York

The Padded Wagon, Mayor John Purroy Mitchel Houses

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.

Residence, Mitchell Power Station

Providence, Rhode Island

Downtown Providence from the Southeast

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.

Granite City

To 2015!