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Jul. 5--I can't tell you which is my favorite photograph among the 199 shots of Chicago in "City 2000," recently published through the University of Illinois Press.
It could be the freelance barber giving a haircut to a young boy on the outdoor gallery of a Chicago Housing Authority building, with the gallery's chain-link fence grate hinting of prison bars.
Or the elderly woman, thoughtful, perhaps wistful, about to sit down at her sunny dining room table for another lunch alone.
Or the six preteen boys in baseball uniforms scattered across a much-cracked concrete school lot, each lost in his own thoughts, their game not yet started or maybe already over.
Or the father and young daughter on what is obviously a very hot Chicago day, the girl letting the blast of an ancient air conditioner fill her face while the shirtless father stands beside her peering through the Venetian blind slats at the street outside.
"City 2000" is not the usual Chicago photo book.
In a way that other works rarely even approach, it captures the city in all its grit and city life in all its ambiguity. Like Chicago itself, each shot is a bit unsettling -- a complex thing in which a smile is juxtaposed with a hand holding two crumpled $10 bills while overhead, in the golden light of sunset, flies an American flag.
The Chicago in this book is the city I know, and the Chicagoans here are the people with whom I share the city -- fat and thin, joyous and sad, contemplative and tired, alert and lost.
It's a great time capsule. A century from now, people will be able to open this book and get a real sense of what it was like to walk along Chicago's streets in our time.
Most photo books that take Chicago as a subject are embarrassingly superficial. Little more than large-scale postcards, they portray a city where everyone is always smiling. A city packed with energy, with activity -- angst-free.
A city where even the homeless look attractively quaint.
In "City 2000," the homeless don't look quaint. They appear, well, human, sometimes playful, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes vaguely scary.
Edited by Teri Boyd and on sale now at $49.95, the book is a product of the unprecedented project, Chicago in the Year 2000, bankrolled by a foundation established by Gary Comer, the founder of Lands' End. From January through December of that year, 200-plus photographers gathered more than half a million images of the city and its people, now preserved in the Comer Archive at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
But the high objectives and multitude of images were no guarantee that "City 2000" would be such a rich work of art and history.
Two years ago, in a similarly complex proceeding, Rich Smolan and David Elliot Cohen produced for DK Publishing an entire shelf of photo books, one for each of the 50 states, using more than 1 million images taken during the course of a single week by 25,000 professional and amateur photographers.
Like the other 49 works, "Illinois 24/7" ($24.95) was bright and cute and resolutely serene. It pictures a state and a Chicago where Little League girls are always blowing bubble gum bubbles, and the dog behind the "No Solicitors" signs looks cuddly, and a 5-ounce baby possum nests in the hand of an animal care worker.
I can understand why books such as "Illinois 24/7" are made, and why they sell.
Taken together, the photos in the book represent an ideal version of who we are. This is who we'd like to be -- and who we would be if only we never lost our temper and didn't have bills to pay and never got a touch of the flu and were always full of fun.
This is who we'd be if we lived in Neverland, Chicago branch.
By contrast, "City 2000" reflects the real world. It evokes complicated feelings about the realities of life in Chicago.
Consider Zulemya Alatorre in her pretty white dress walking down a sidewalk in the Pilsen neighborhood after making her First Communion. Seen from the back, she is struggling to keep her filmy white veil from ripping away from her head on a strong gust of wind.
Before her on the sidewalk is a large square of wood or metal, most likely covering a hole in the pavement, and in the distance is the squat skyline of a Pilsen street.
There's nothing cute about the photo.
Down to the plastic bag one of Zulemya's sisters carries from one hand, the shot is a juncture of the mundane and transcendent. It is faith and decay and beauty and nature and family and utility and hope and fear in a single moment -- in a single image.
This is what I want those people in 2106 to see when they want to know how we lived today -- this and the other 198 photos in "City 2000."
Zulemya's city is mine, and that of all Chicagoans.
preardon@tribune.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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