Japanese photographer Satoki Nagata moved to Chicago in 1992 to document the city and its people. His background is in neuroscience (he has a PhD in the field), but his passion is creating intimate documentary photography projects in his city.
During a recent winter, Nagata decided to try his hand at using a flash for street photography at night. Instead of mounting his flash to his camera, however, he decided to use it off camera. Combined with the light rain and falling snow, the flash turned many of his photographs into abstract and surreal images that almost look as though he overlaid photographs of stars. Read more…
This past Tuesday, a major fire gutted an abandoned warehouse in Chicago. More than 50 fire companies and nearly 200 firefighters were summoned to the scene to battle the blaze. What’s interesting is that temperatures in the area were so low that the water used to put out the fire quickly froze, turning the building into a giant block of ice. Read more…
Less than a week removed from the train photographer tragedy in Sacramento, California, another sad story has made its way across our desks. A 23-year-old man named Nicholas Wieme died in the pursuit of a “rooftopping” photograph yesterday after he fell into a building’s smokestack in Chicago. Read more…
Photographer Tim Chao created this beautiful photo of a dark figure standing over the Chicago skyline by shooting a double exposure. It’s titled “Metamorphosis”, was shot with a Nikon FM on Kodak TX 400, and is part of a double exposure project titled “Worlds Within“.
Here’s a photo essay that documents Magnum photographer Alex Webb‘s exploration of the streets of Chicago. In an interview with Leica, Webb states,
[...] I am not trying to convey messages. I take photographs to affirm reality, not explain reality and that reality often has a high level of ambiguity to it, which is subject to interpretation. So what one viewer discovers in a given image may be very different from what another viewer discovers. This particular photograph seems to suggest to you something about corporate culture, but another viewer might simply be amused by the similarity of be-suited figures and another viewer might find something else. I believe in photographs that have a level of ambiguity, images that work on suggestion, that ask questions rather than provide answers.
