Category: Text
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A Year of Projects and More Travel
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.…
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Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia
Last week I traveled to Atlanta, Georgia to co-present a paper at an academic conference and spend a little time exploring in the region. I only had parts of three days away from the conference, but thanks to some planning, I was able to accomplish more than I anticipated. The following photographs are some of…
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Visiting Detroit the Day it Declared Bankruptcy
The news about Detroit’s bankruptcy broke as I finished packing the car for the four hour drive across Michigan. We weren’t visiting Detroit to cover its bankruptcy and didn’t seek out the choreographed events looping through the headlines. Other than bumping into a press conference complete with half a dozen news vans and plenty of…
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The Buffalo Telescope House (and Some Silos)
Last week I returned to Buffalo, New York for the Society of Architectural Historians‘ annual meeting. As usual, I took advantage of the combination of arriving early and a little free time to explore the city. While my last trip was primarily dedicated to photographing the great buildings of the city’s expansion era, I had…
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In Between Detroit’s Failing Streetlights
With Detroit’s pending emergency manager likely addressing the city’s failing streetlight system, and business groups funding streetlights on their own, I thought it was time to post an excerpt of a project on which I’ve been working since 2009. When I moved from Chicago to Southwest Detroit for the summer of 2009, I was determined…
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A Year of Demolition in Chicago (and Some Travel)
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…