In 2005 I began The Pilsen Project, which I am presently concluding, and is the motivation for this application:

This series was made in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, the city's largest Mexican-American community. The project arose from my career long interest in photographing American locales where past and present interplay, where I feel a strong sense of place. The name Pilsen is derived from the original, mostly Czech, immigrants who established themselves there in the late 19th Century, close to the industries that employed them. Since the late 1960's, the European immigrant population has declined, moving to the suburbs, and today Pilsen is predominately Mexican-American.



This is singularly a Chicago place, with its plain dwellings and shops pressed onto the grid of streets and alleys. Public art, religious images and symbols, political posters and graffiti abound along side everyday advertising signs displayed in both Spanish and English; all overlain on the backdrop of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American architecture.

For the Pilsen Project, I worked in color and monochrome, producing panoramas and polytychs. This method arose through my sensory response to the syncopated visual rhythms of the neighborhood. Walking past a familiar corner, I would be confronted by a new mural, replacing an old one perhaps, or new to its brick façade. The jumble of sights came up against one another in my mind, the memory of one with another. Upon reviewing early work, I was struck by how pairs of images reverberated with my experience of being there.

The urban streets are suited to the pace of walking. The linearity of the shops along the sidewalks is a panorama of the eye, a kind of cinematic experience - a storefront façade jumps to another displaying disparate meanings, juxtapositions of color, image and text fill the senses. To manifest my feeling for the energy of the street, I enhanced color values, and also worked with a panorama format camera. The narrow format of the 6x17 centimeter frame seemed to harmonize my physical movements with how I experienced the place.

Photographing Pilsen is to witness an ongoing performance. To borrow a term from literature, there is “magical realism” to this neighborhood. My intent is to express the exuberance of life reflected in the public imagery of all kinds on all manner of surfaces. I see Pilsen as a place of hope, a symbiosis of Mexican and American culture, history and politics.