Introduction to Photographs of Southeast Chicago
I photographed in the industrial area at the southern end of the metropolitan Chicago landscape for a total of about five years: 1986 through 1988, and then I returned to do more work there in 1997 and 1998. It’s a large and important area, full of history and pressing issues. When I started photographing there, several huge steel mills had recently shut down or radically downsized, victims of foreign competition and automation. The area, like much of the industrial Midwest, was experiencing a dramatic economic decline. When people in Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana saw me photographing and asked what I was doing, I would tell them that I had uncles who had worked in the mills, I was concerned with that widespread industrial deterioration, and that I was trying to document the area and show the issues people in the area were facing.
That was true, so far as it went. But it was not the initial reason I started this long project. My motives at first were not really concerned with the economic, social, and environmental issues of the area. Rather, this project was personal, and began because I was wondering whether or not I was a documentary photographer. This long project describing the industrial area started as a couple of simple questions that I asked myself: Could I pick a place and describe and record it clearly in photographs? And in those photographs, could I develop a personal point of view?
These questions were a reaction to the photographs I was making in the early 1980’s in downtown Chicago, photographs that were increasingly involved with the visual design of the photograph itself. At that time, I had photographed downtown Chicago for over ten years, and had tried to balance my interest in the grammar of Photography with an interest in documenting the downtown landscape. But then I had a small epiphany listening to Peter Bacon Hales lecture on the Hudson River School of landscape painting and its formula for structuring a landscape image – composing a landscape into the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime. Peter presented this as a visual formula that was directly connected to a particular philosophy of God’s nature and man’s place in it. Sitting in that lecture hall, I suddenly realized that, although I did not have a similar attitude toward the city landscapes, I often unconsciously adopted that same visual formula in composing my own pictures of Chicago. My pictures of downtown often were structured into that form with a clear visual flow of foreground, middle ground and background. I wondered if I could change my compositional habits and break that pattern. That thought prompted a couple of years of work where I concentrated on finding different ways to describe (and confuse) space in landscape photographs. Most of my photographs of downtown Chicago in that period were concerned primarily with those visual experiments. My work became more and more about issues in picture-making and less and less about “documentary”.
I was a little troubled by this. Throughout my career, I’ve felt the pull of two strong traditions in contemporary Photography. To simplify this, I might say that I’ve been deeply influenced by the documentary work of Walker Evans: very perceptive, focused, personal – even idiosyncratic -descriptions of the everyday world. And also, I’ve also been hugely impressed and influenced by the work of Harry Callahan: photographs as photographs, serious explorations of the visual grammar and potential of Photography.
Evans and Callahan. It was like trying to steer my small boat with guidance from two very different lighthouses on the horizon. Often, I hoped that the best course was in the middle, trying to learn from both traditions and hoping to create a fusion. But as I worked over the years, my little craft would inevitably drift in one direction or the other. In the early 1980’s, I realized that my experiments in picture design had slid me far away from the documentary course. I considered trying to reset the balance while continuing to work downtown. But then I thought that starting fresh in a new area would be better. I picked the industrial area of Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana.
I grew up on the far northern edge of Chicago, and still lived on the North Side and taught downtown. The area I chose to photograph was at the other end of the metropolitan landscape, 20 miles or more away. But I had some connection to the place. My father’s family was from there. My grandfather once had a small grocery store in Whiting, Indiana. Several of my uncles had lived in the area, and two of them had worked for Inland Steel. As a child, I was shocked and fascinated by the heavy industry we drove by on the way to visit relatives. Huge dark and dirty factories, smoke, flares from the refineries, and intense smells. One uncle and his wife lived in Inland Steel company housing.
Looking at this landscape of heavy industry, it might surprise someone to learn that this area could have become the resort area of Chicago. The south end of Lake Michigan offered an arc of lovely beaches and sand dunes. There were small lakes, rivers and marshes. Frank Lloyd Wright drew up plans for a big amusement park and resort that he hoped would be built on the shore of Wolf Lake. The natural beauty of this area could have been valued, cherished, and preserved. The steel mills and refineries might have been built to the north of downtown Chicago. But the juncture of the Calumet River and Lake Michigan offered a useful port for new industries. By the time of the Civil War, some small steel mills and other industries were located in South Chicago. And the biggest addition to the area occurred in 1906, when the United States Steel corporation constructed a huge steel mill at the southern end of Lake Michigan. The plant and the new, adjoining city were named after US Steel’s chairman, Elbert H. Gary. US Steel later acquired Illinois Steel Works in South Chicago, which became US Steel South Works, another impressively large factory complex on the lakefront, stretching more than a mile long, from roughly 79th Street to 91st Street.
Before automation and foreign competition, these industries employed huge numbers of people.
For example, at its height, US Steel Gary Works employed over 30,000 workers directly, plus thousands of other workers onsite, such as contractors, truck drivers and rail workers. Tens of thousands of other workers did shifts at Inland Steel, Wisconsin Steel, oil refineries, fabricators, rail yards, trucking companies and other businesses. These were good jobs which generally didn’t require even a high school diploma. Just outside the gates of US Steel Gary Works, the city of Gary was prosperous with a population of over 100,000. Commercial hubs like South Chicago’s 92nd Street, and the downtowns of Hammond, East Chicago, Indiana Harbor and other cities were full of restaurants, bars, and local shops. The residential areas were made up of modest but tidy houses.
It’s also important to note that this area had many significant problems. Horribly polluted air, ground, and water threatened the health of the whole region. Many of these jobs were dangerous with very problematic working conditions. This area, like all of the US, exhibited racial injustice and other serious social issues. But for many people in Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana, there was a long period of modest prosperity and security. My steelworker uncles lived in very small duplex houses, built by the steel company. They bought new Buicks every three years. They were happy there, and thought they had achieved stable and comfortable lives.
By the early 1980’s, all that changed across the upper Midwest, and heavy industry was in trouble. In 1953, the steel industry in the US employed 650,000 workers. In 1984, that number had dropped to 236,000. And that’s just the direct employees of the steel industry. After jobs cut by the mills, there were many people who lost employment in transportation, related industries, and neighborhood businesses.
The causes were many. Just some of the factors were the strong US dollar bolstered by the Federal Reserve, the oil crisis, the revolution in Iran, and a sharp increase in global trade and foreign competition. The plants in the Midwest were old, labor intensive facilities. Automation cut the cost in newer factories, helping them outperform the old Midwest mills. Walter Mondale is credited with coining the term “Rust Belt” to describe the industrial Midwest during the 1984 presidential campaign.
I knew all this in 1986, but that didn’t necessarily help me get started with my project. Where would I begin? It’s a big area, full of astonishing things to look at and also full of challenges for a photographer. I began by just going down there often and driving around at random. I took pictures when I noticed an opportunity, and thought about how I might structure a project like this. What would my focus be? Where were my boundaries for this project? Those questions distracted me during my initial trips to the area. I found the questions and choices overwhelming.
So, I decided that a very simple structure for my project might be best. I would choose physical borders for the project and just photograph everything interesting within my selected area. Based on what I had seen during those early days spent in the area, I decided on 79th Street in Chicago at the North, Torrence Avenue on the West, I80-94 on the South, and Gary, Indiana on the East. I drew lines on the paper map I had in the car. That simple idea and my clear choices ended a lot of my confusion and I found that I could then get down to work.
The first question I had was whether I could get into any of the huge steel mills or refineries that dominated the landscape. This proved to be very difficult. Plants were cutting back and shutting down, and no one was eager for more publicity. James Brennan, a photography collector and owner of a steel distribution business, helped me make some contacts. I spent a long afternoon in Wisconsin Steel after it had shut down, three days in US Steel South Works, and arranged another visit to a small steel factory near Torrence Avenue. That was my access in total. Frustrating, but although the mills and refineries were fascinating things to photograph, I thought that they were not my priority. I knew that David Plowden and Terry Evans had made some excellent photographs of these steel mills. I felt that my primary subject was the industrial landscape as a whole.
While I was trying to produce a cohesive photographic description of the industrial area, I was also hoping to develop my own stance on South East Chicago and Northwest Indiana. I have always been interested in the kind of documentary photography that develops and displays the personal point of view of the photographer. Sometimes that can be the photographer’s strong emotions and opinions. Or it might be simply what the photographer finds most compelling and significant about a subject.
One of the first aspects of the place that interested me was the huge scale of views and objects in the landscape. I grew up and still lived on the North Side of Chicago. It’s an area of mostly two and three-story apartment buildings. Tight and consistent blocks with very small lawns and few open spaces. But down in the industrial area, there were wide open vistas and giant objects everywhere, the Skyway, railroad bridges, factories and refineries. So that became one of my first concentrations.
I could see and photograph signs of the economic crisis everywhere. Factories and refineries were being torn down or were abandoned. Bridges and railroad lines were rusted and overgrown. When times were good the salaries of workers supported bars and restaurants outside the factory gates and lively little downtown areas full of stores and restaurants. Gary Indiana’s downtown, the centers of Hammond and Indiana Harbor, and East 92nd Street in South Chicago were examples of that. Now most of the businesses were closed and boarded up. The residential buildings in the area were also showing signs of age and decay. I could see layers of repair, signs of damage and distress. Looking for hints of the economic situation in the structures and landscape was another of my first interests.
When I was a kid visiting my uncles, one of the things that surprised me was to see well-kept houses so close to the huge mills, oil storage tanks, and other heavy industry. On those visits, I couldn’t stop looking down the block, past the houses to the giant black cranes and piles of raw materials. I found the juxtapositions fascinating then, and even more so now. I looked for those intersections of the residential and industrial. Of course, there were no Google Maps or Google Earth while I was doing this project. Instead, I discovered the highly detailed paper maps that the Department of Interior produced, called 7.5 maps. I bought the half dozen of those that covered this area and studied them, looking for small clusters of homes wedged into areas of heavy industry. Those maps led me to places I might never have discovered.
Finally, I was surprised to find myself thinking about Nature. While I consider myself a landscape photographer, I am only interested in what I think of as human landscapes. These are landscapes that were created or significantly changed by human beings, landscapes that show the signs of human history and activity, and landscapes that now shape the lives of people who live and work in them. I’ve never been interested in photographing pure, untouched Nature. But as I worked down in the industrial area, I would sometimes get a strong hint of that feeling one can get in a natural landscape. A big sky, green plants, and a beautiful shine on a river or canal. While I knew that this area was once a lovely place of exceptional sand dunes, and pristine marshes, streams, rivers, and small lakes, Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana had become of the most degraded and toxic areas in the US, with extreme soil, air and water pollution, and industrial waste and biproducts everywhere. And yet, new trees and plants were now growing back on the sites of closed and abandoned mills and refineries. Foliage grew on unused bridges. Canals that had been dug for barges serving the mills and refineries were now mostly quiet. I saw people fishing in unlikely places. I thought I could see some hints of the lovely landscape that had been there before the industry arrived. And perhaps these were some small indications of future repairs to the landscape.
As I mentioned earlier, I started this project as an experiment to help me decide what kind of photographer I was. Was I still a Documentary photographer? I went down there to do a short, test. But as I worked in the area, I became more and more fascinated by the place and challenged by the problem of how to describe it in a straightforward and yet personal manner. I forgot that I just wanted an answer to that simple question and I spent much more time down there than I ever intended. And that, of course, provided the answer to my question. I actually was a Documentary photographer. After a total of about five years working in the area, I didn’t stop photographing Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana because I thought I had done everything possible in this area. I knew there was more to do. But I wanted to do other projects about other parts of Chicago. And I approached working in those other areas newly aware and more comfortable about what sort of photographer I was.
Bob Thall 2022