Chicago photography

May 16, 2024 1:44 PM

Neighbors and neighborhoods near Midway Airport. I loved these photos, seeing them is like biking around in these neighborhoods. It's so easy to take photos now, but ordinary life with good composition and good light is still an unexpected pleasure.
posted by lwxxyyzz (19 comments total)

I don’t understand. I was led to believe the city was an uninhabitable hellscape.
posted by non canadian guy at 2:05 PM on May 16 [8 favorites]

I love Chicago.
posted by chavenet at 2:18 PM on May 16 [8 favorites]

Chicago is a truly fantastic biking city-- flat, straight streets, residential parallel to throughways lots of places, great neighborhoods, some well cared-for, some not. There's a good rentabike system, divvy. I'm partial because I mostly grew up there and still have family there, but these photos capture a kind of vibe that's easy to find there. Also a lot of great food.
posted by lwxxyyzz at 2:19 PM on May 16 [5 favorites]

These are great. Thanks for posting this -
posted by niicholas at 2:19 PM on May 16

My wife grew up in this area. Those pictures look like they could have been taken on her block, although she was a bit closer to Nick and Vito's.

I was led to believe the city was an uninhabitable hellscape.

One thing to note is that Chicago fire and police officers are required to live inside the city limits. The area around Midway is inside that boundary, but as far from dense urban as one can get. So you do get a higher proportion of public service officers as your neighbors. Just sayin'.
posted by JoeZydeco at 2:57 PM on May 16 [5 favorites]

This is good.
posted by BrashTech at 6:09 PM on May 16

I used to go to the Baby Doll Polka Lounge in this neighborhood--pretty sure Karolinka's is it
posted by Morpeth at 7:04 PM on May 16

Morpeth, the photo's caption says it was.
posted by Badgermann at 7:32 PM on May 16 [1 favorite]

Good find, great photos.
posted by fruitslinger at 8:32 PM on May 16

Thank you for the post; I would have never seen these great photos otherwise.

I grew up right next to a (much smaller, and in a much smaller city) international airport, also with housing right up to the fence, and it’s amazing how different these neighbourhoods are. (Look at this farmhouse!)
posted by wachhundfisch at 12:46 AM on May 17

These are amazing, thanks for the post!!
posted by sonika at 3:25 AM on May 17

Really captures the Chicago single family home neighborhood vibe. Very cool.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:02 AM on May 17

(And I'd love ONE post about Chicago without someone mentioning our undeserved bad reputation, gonna start flagging those next time as derails on positive Chi posts!)
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:03 AM on May 17 [4 favorites]

Mod note: This awesome post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:11 AM on May 17

That map which JoeZydeco linked above is fascinating. If you lay it out next to a regular city map, you can see how all the “elevated temperature” zones line up exactly with shopping centers (and their associated parking lots).
posted by notoriety public at 8:47 AM on May 17

I like the commentary. Helps me appreciate the artistic choices made by photographers, and understand what it is that's so compelling about these.
posted by OnceUponATime at 8:52 AM on May 17

He looks like kind of a guy you wouldn’t want to talk to. Turns out, he’s one of the nicest guys ever. He wants me to have a beer with him.

Honestly not a bad description for the city as a whole.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:06 AM on May 17 [4 favorites]

When I drive along Archer Avenue near the airport, it abruptly pulls me out of the world of Big-Ten signifiers that dominates the north-side, lake-adjacent neighborhoods where I work & live. And the side streets around Midway (I drove for a meal delivery program in Gage Park once upon a time) reflect a bungalow-ed, immigrant residential life that makes me simultaneously 'see' Mexico City (where I lived for several years) and my father-in-law's Chicago (he grew up in an immigrant household in a different part of city ~80 years ago).

Which is to say, this part of the city has layers, plenty of them, and I love the artist's choice to explore the neighborhood with his photography.

That said -- I was underwhelmed by the blurbs. I hear you, OnceUponATime, that the blurbs reflect the appeal of the situation to the photographer, but I want to hear a bit more of the subject's story. A little more Blue Highways, a little less excitement about how you got an elderly couple out of a Cadillac to pose for you. There's more than a few stories in these photographs -- the young man from India! that elderly couple! trainhoppers! -- and I'm curious why the artist elided those.
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 1:01 PM on May 17 [4 favorites]

These are great! I found the photographer's website, which has additional photographs, all of them absolutely worth viewing, but also includes a really interesting long collection of journal entries from 1989-2002, the years he was making earlier photos, mostly in Pilsen, a largely-Mexican neighborhood at the time, and his experiences with the place and the people--some really thoughtful and fascinating commentary on street/documentary photography of communities one is not part of.
posted by Kat Allison at 5:02 PM on May 17 [2 favorites]