Isolated Building Study 13 (2007)

These Isolated Building Studies are the visual confluence of my interests in urban dynamism, socioeconomic inequality and photography. By using a common composition to eliminate physical variables from these solo subjects, I hope to draw our attention to new ways of seeing the common impact of divergent investment processes on Chicago neighborhoods.

In each photograph, one building is literally the center of attention; however, the absence of buildings at the margins is as critical to each image as the featured structure.

Initially, viewers may see the buildings in this set as identical, but the novel, consistent context shows these buildings as symbols of communities in flux. Whether a building is a pioneer or a survivor, built by gentrification or decayed by divestment, these buildings and their environs demonstrate how investment cycles affect the visible differences and similarities in our built environment, urban neighborhoods and community relationships.

Residential buildings comprise the core of the Studies. In many neighborhoods, particularly on the South Side and near West Side, these most personal places are the bellwethers of dramatic economic development dynamics. As our homes go, so go our neighborhoods.

Commercial and community structures are also featured in the set to signal the simultaneous connection and detachment these institutions have with residents in rapidly transforming neighborhoods. Given these buildings’ roles as economic, spiritual and social loci of communities, their status is indicative of the health of those aspects of neighborhood life. When operative, such institutions are islands of stability for their constituents. When shuttered, commercial and community buildings demonstrate further ambiguity about transitions in neighborhood life. A church may just as easily close because of divestment as gentrification, given the corresponding changes in the characteristics of local residents.

As such, the Isolated Building Studies demonstrate the paradox that by removing these scenes from their context and recontextualizing them among buildings in dramatically dissimilar situations reveals as least as much about neighborhood change as examination of these structures in their original settings.