What I'm doing with this webring id ...

The first page I registered with it is something called Streeterville and the Near North Side which, conceptually, is a very simple page. What I would (and still) do is hop the CTA (Chicago transit authority) or other mass transit line in the Chicago area, disembark with my camera (usually a manual pentax), and trace a kind-of circular route through the place I visited, snapping as many photos along the way as I could, of things that grabbed my eye, or gave a sense of the place I was visiting. It's like using my camera to let you come with me on a virtual walk. The idea is not just for you to see a series of disconnected images, but to give you the feeling of being there.

For the most part, I don't tend to focus on the "big" sights that tourism pages tend to obsess on. As a native of the Chicago area, I felt that images given of my home city tended to give a distorted image of the place. Like I've said elsewhere, one always saw images of the Loop, always taken as panoramas, which usually seemed to be taken from near one cliched spot (walk down North Avenue to the Lake, and you're there) or on the deck of one of those cruise boats. To look at these, you'd think that La Salle street, architecturally a lot more interesting than the unimaginative and bulky towers you see in those stereotyped images, didn't even exist, or that the city just sort of vanished somewhere around Oak Street.

At the same time, I've tried, as I've begun to learn this craft, to avoid the self-consciously postmodern artistry and obsession with the grotesquerie of urban life that I've often seen offline, in favor of a more naturalistic and psychologically honest approach, one that doesn't shy away from the fact that there are some things that we do shy away from, and with good reason. Yes, as I walk down the street, I do run into career drunks who look like they're about to begin decomposing, heavily tatooed and pieced modern primitives, and any number of other disagreeable sights that some will focus on, to the exclusion of anything pleasant. These images, when they are all that we see of the city, become as much a cliche and as much a lie as those antiseptic images of the glass towers rising above the pristine Lake, seen from so high above that one would never see the garbage washing up on the beach. Or walking down it in speedos, carrying cases of zima to share with the silicone inflated ladies down by the pier, as the case may be.

Call this a more unapologetically middle class approach to the subject matter, projecting an attitude of the kind you'd expect from somebody who isn't about to let himself feel ashamed of the fact that he's a nice, normal Midwestern boy next door who grew up in a Norman Rockwell like setting, or pretend that he's anything but. I try to steer somewhere between the extremes of vacuous, wealth-obsessed 80s style glitz and depressing, misery-obsessed 90s style grunge. These are images for the rest of us, the silent majority that is expected to be invisible and properly apologetic about the fact of its existence, shot by one of "the rest of us", who isn't afraid to admit that he's learning as he's doing, and that he has a lot left to learn. I hope you'll enjoy them.