Dylan MacEwen

IDEA 410

            My Capstone project will revolve around the making and possibly publishing a book of photographs as well as drawings to capture what Chicago means to its citizens. I’ll most likely be sending out a survey to the general public, asking them what Chicago is/means to them. If that’s a place, or memory, or something as simple as Wrigley Field. I’d like to collect people’s responses and record them on a page to which I’d add a photograph, illustration, or both! I think this would be a great way to capture the city in its purest form, which is through the eyes of its residents. I’d love to get a wide demographic so my responses aren’t too limited. I also want to take the photos entirely in black and white, I believe it adds more personality to photos than if they were in color. (This is subject to change, but for now, black and white it is). My goal is to capture Chicago through the eyes of its own residents and make a comprehensive photo/illustration book of the City of Chicago.

Initially I would like to go out and take some photos of what I think people might include in their descriptions of the city, or a special place to them. I think going out and doing some research of my own, before I get any sort of survey together might be educational. I will also have to narrow down a style of drawing for the book itself. Something simple but with enough detail to capture whatever I’m depicting. I think amidst the world of COVID-19, pictures I would be capturing could come to be very unique. For example, the Bean, aka Cloudgate looks very different now than it usually does. Given very few people are out and about, I think I’ll be able to capture the city in a very unique way. Below are some articles and books I’ll be drawing inspiration from during my project.

            In “Edward Ruscha ‘Twenty-six Gasoline Stations’ 1963,” he photographed twenty-six different gas stations throughout California. The photos are beautiful in their own way, for something as mundane as gas stations, he does a great job photographing them. He takes the photos I strive to take. He has the name of the gas station and where it’s located on the left hand of the page, and the photo of the gas station on the right. I might incorporate this within my book, but I was thinking of including the quotes within the pictures. White text on a predominately dark photograph, and vice versa.

            The Washington post has an article that I found very helpful and something I would like to incorporate into my work. “An Artist Quarantined in China Illustrates What It’s like to Live on Lockdown.” The Washington Post, WP Company. This was very interesting, and I encourage everyone to give it a read. An artist depicts what life has been like since the outbreak of Covid-19. Seeing as this was a webpage, it did not read like one. You click on the screen which starts with a drawing and once you left click, a block of text pops up with context for the image you’re looking at. The illustrations are impressive but very simplistic. I think this style of recording is far more interesting and really captures the moment instead of just writing an article. Visuals as well as text are very important to a reader in my opinion.

            Kevin Hatch writes on Edward Ruscha, the author of  ‘Twenty-six Gasoline Stations’ 1963 and what kinds of images he makes. Hatch describes Ruscha’s photography as “wolves in sheep’s clothing, complex and refractory objects that have confounded repeated attempts at categorization”. He also goes on to say, “Ruscha’s books reward close visual attention, as the readings above suggest, but they posit a mode of viewing that is entirely at odds with formalist delectation—and resistant to the postmodernist flattening of the photographic”. Hatch compares photography and language and their ability to be manipulated. He says there are points at which language fails, thus; photography has its limitations. This was a good point that was brought up and it made me think that I might need to illustrate more times than not. If a story or quote someone sent in cannot be captured in a photograph, it’s my job to do it justice in the form of an illustration.

            A book I’d like to reference and read from time to time is Yi Tu Fuan’s book, Space and Place. Fuan talks about people’s relationships to how they form attachments to their home, neighborhood, and nation. He talks about how the mind of a child differs from that of an adult and how it related to mood as well as memory. “This inability, for most people, to recapture the mood of their own childhood world suggests how far the adult’s schemata, geared primarily to life’s practical demands, differ from those of the child”. He explains the stages of infancy and how much we soak in at such a young age. As we grow, our ability to explore space grows with us, thus, forming and shaping the relationships we have with space as adults. I’d be curious to see what answers I’ll receive from others about what Chicago means to them and see if any of them are related to their childhood.

Bibliography: 

• Tate. “Edward Ruscha ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ 1963.” Tate, www.tate.org.uk/about-us/projects/transforming-artist-books/summaries/edward-ruscha-twentysix-gasoline-stations-1963.  
• “An Artist Quarantined in China Illustrates What It’s like to Live on Lockdown.” The Washington Post, WP Company, www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/magazine/2020/03/17/an-artist-quarantined-china-illustrates-what-its-like-live-lockdown/.  
• Shibboleth Authentication Request, www-mitpressjournals-org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287053148102.
• Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.