5 Places – A response to strangedavid
somebodystrange asked (oh so long ago): "A young photographer is looking for suggestions of five places to go in Chicagoland to take photos. Where do you send him and why?"
I've really struggled with this question, probably due to over-thinking it.
Photography covers such a broad spectrum...because it covers everything. Pretty tourist scenes to hard-core photojournalism to abstractions. So, my brain started trying to pick a category and from that category,choose 5 locations.
And then I thought perhaps I should tie my answers to my own photography project. Should I pick 5 areas that I've visited and enjoyed? But that is such a specific and narrow focus (a 2 mile radius), would it not be too limiting?
So here's what I've come up with. Chicago is the city of neighborhoods. It's a city built on individual communities all tied together. I want to visit these communities; I want to learn about who lives there, who works there, and what there is to photograph. With that in mind, I would instruct the young photographer thus:
From downtown Chicago, pick an El train line. Ride it for however long you want and then exit. Walk back to the station you started from. Repeat 4 more times choosing a different line each time. What you see depends on how far you want to walk, but what you will gather is a detailed view of what Chicago really /is/. An alternate method to this plan would be to exit the El and walk the neighborhood around that stop for the time it would take to walk back to your point origin.
Oh and one addendum: make sure to travel up and down the lakeshore by way of the bike path. The views are nice.