ABOUT CHICAGO IMAGES: THE B...
About Chicago Images:The business district of a modern city is organized chiefly by purely functional means. These spaces are not conceived as “living space”, so there seems to be no need to create room for retreat. The ideal of such a business district is sterile. But what happens if people use those places contrary to the original function, as “living space”? What strategies can a homeless person develop under these circumstances, to retreat within such an area?
The images of this series were created between August and December 2005 in Chicago . During this period, at nighttime, I went about twelve times into downtown Chicago (the area of the so-called “ Loop ” and the “Magnificent Mile”). There, I was looking for sleeping homeless people, to take pictures of their attempts to retreat. During those nights I found a couple of hundred persons, and took more than 200 photographs. In each of those images at least one homeless person can be found.
In Chicago there are extreme climatic differences between summer and winter. That ́s why I divided the series into two chapters. The images of the first part all were created during the months of August and September, those of the second part in November and December.
The average temperature during nights in the months of August and September is 61°Fahrenheit (16°Celsius). At the end of the year, in November and December, this temperature falls to 25°Fahrenheit which equals -4°Celsius.