Almost one year after the opening of Chicago’s $475 million-dollar Millennium Park, a bustling crowd of people strolled through the park in the hot summer weather, observing artwork.
From June 10 to 30, the City of Chicago is showcasing “Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait,” a series of 100 photographs by Terry Evans. The oversize photographs, located on the Central Chase Promenade and the South Boeing Gallery at the park, capture Chicago from an aerial perspective at the beginning of the 21st century.
The photographs are arranged by topic –themes include farming, city neighborhoods, steel mills and suburbs. Evans’ pictures depict a variety of settings, from Chicago’s southwest side to the intersection of Lakeshore Drive and Sheridan Road. Others depart from the city, capturing a field in Crystal Lake and the Abraham Lincoln National Veterans Cemetery in Will County.
By displaying these photographs, Evans said he hopes to approach issues such as conservation, endangered habitats and city growth. Many of her pieces deal with how people transform wastes into public spaces, mainly Chicago’s lakefront, much of which is landfill.
As Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin said, “Nature didn’t give Chicago its glorious shoreline. Good planning did.”
The industrialization and urbanization these images depict might depress some, but Elk Grove, Ill., resident Bill Mahoney said he liked that the photographs showed the cleanliness of the city.
“Chicago’s been in the limelight of being one of the dirtiest cities, but I think it’s just the opposite,” he said.
Johnny Blunt, a Chicago resident of eight years, decided to pay a visit to the exhibit after seeing a brochure at the Art Institute of Chicago, located just a block away from the park. He said he found it “very informative, very beautiful.”
The exhibit also includes a set of five charts that show how much of the Chicago area is comprised of forest, development, wetland, agriculture and open urban space.
The charts compare the years 1900, 1950, 2000 and 2030. Generally, development is shown to be expanding into more suburbs as natural lands decrease. The final chart shows the impending threat predicted by this general trend.
Evans’ work also shows the costs of urban growth. One image, shot in May of 2003, shows the demolition of a public housing site near Roosevelt Road and Racine Avenue.
The Chicago Housing Authority is in the middle of a 10-year, $1.6-billion plan to transform Chicago public housing. This calls for the demolition of approximately 50 high-rise buildings, scheduled to be replaced by 25,000 new or rehabilitated units.
Images in Evans’ city neighborhoods collection put the focus on economic inequality in the city and the suburbs. The wealth gap tends to be larger in suburban areas due to the lack of wealthy neighborhoods to subsidize services for residents.
Evans’s landscape photographs also show farms in Kane and Will counties, as well as bodies of water such as the Kankakee River.
Coming to Chicago to shoot photographs was a significant departure from Evans’ native Kansas, where she was known for her work with prairie landscapes. Her main focus there was the various textures of the land.
She brought this attention to detail to the conserved lands in the area surrounding Chicago, capturing conserved areas in all four seasons.
These images show that not all of the Chicago area has been urbanized, Mahoney said.
“We have so much to be thankful for,” he said.
In order to capture these various images, Evans traveled throughout these regions, mainly by helicopter, but also by hot air balloon and Piper Cub, a small plane. These forms of transportation enabled her to see each region from a new perspective.
Having gone on approximately 50 flights, she snapped close to 5,000 images. Yet only 100 images make up this series.
“The city is so rich,” Evans said in a recent interview in Chicago. “There’s so much beauty here, I don’t think even my 100 pictures begin to scratch the surface.”
Reach Janet Oh at [email protected].
