Chicago is the city where I grew up. It's on this pavement where my foundation was laid.
While working as an electrical contractor, I applied the skills I picked up in art school toward learning and growing in that industry. However, the appeal of making photographs was never lost on me.
Originally, I didn’t set out to make a document of the city or of the ever expanding environment- I was making these pictures because I thought the locations were special. In some sense I was compiling this archive while not realizing at the time that it could be a relevant historical document of the city, but it was a visual journal of my life. While managing construction sites for interior office build-outs in buildings and skyscrapers downtown, I gained access to sections of offices slated for demolition, gutted interiors, and half-built steel structures. Through these unique perspectives, I was able to capture images that reveal vulnerable, exposed portraits of Chicago’s downtown loop skyscrapers that to many of us become omnipresent, monolithic structures. With the ever-present evolution of construction, architecture, and new buildings stacking up every year we should not take these views for granted. This obsessive shooting helped me to amass somewhere around 5,000 images and these books are a compilation of what I have determined to be the best visual storytelling of my time.
Sometimes it felt a bit awkward being the person at the construction site that was always gleaming out the windows admiring the view. A wise one could assume that I was more interested in the expansive views rather than collecting pertinent info regarding my actual reason for being there. This way of shooting for me was more of a photo-journalistic approach, I didn’t typically have a lot of time to set up the shot and had to deal with the conditions that were there. Which often meant shitty weather, harsh sun, quickly setting exposure settings and shooting quickly. I felt so lucky to have this opportunity. These images are a document of my time in this space. Bouncing in for just a brief moment, but being so enthralled to look out over the city in that way is really special. While this work presents my time there as an observer, I’ve felt that I’ve also created a document of Chicago over the last decade from a new perspective. You’ll see that the majority of this work was captured from heights above street level.