A follow-up to The Idea.

It's moving right along.

This image is an aerial view of a portion of my drive into work. A friend of mine once referred to this route as the "back" entrance to the city. The highway is flanked with a lot of cement, refinery silos, cargo freight, industrial holding tanks, rocks and parking lots. The south branch of the Chicago River to Lake Michigan adds another degree of "charm". It's not "pretty". This and a general perceived ugliness regarding this stretch of highway got me thinking about beauty.


In January I started another 5-day commute after about 4 1/2 years of basically a floating schedule. This meant once again enduring "traffic". This traffic is nothing like the reverse commute from Chicago to Wheeling, which I promised myself I'd never do again, but it can be taxing regardless, day after day. So, I am definitely met with odd stares when I mention that through the transition from cushy to rigid schedule, one of the perks is my morning commute. This 18 mile drive can easily take up to an hour.

I think that what throws most people, is that they imagine an hour of this:

Oddly, I almost never see this. To me the morning commute is an hour to myself where I can drink coffee, listen to news or music, and basically zone out looking at things from an odd perspective. This is how I happened to decide to explore a different approach to what beautiful really looks like to me.

The shapes, lines and colors in any given composition you frame can be so perfect. It has become a sort of pass time for me to pick an ordinary land-/factory-scape and remove it's reality to it's own raw qualities of tones, pattern and simplicity.



This is a project very much mentally in the works as Spring came and went, thus changing a lot of the "beauty" I was observing. Just light and weather makes everything different. It's a drag to see something every day changing and not be able to capture what that looks like besides what your memory determines you'll see. But hopefully these help the point?


At one point I was obsessed with splashes of yellow.

Most of these were snapped while I was at a stand-still in my car, which I much preferred to the alternative I suffered this weekend, grabbing the ones I've never been able to get but want. Taking pictures along an expressway at 7 am on a Sunday isn't quite the same as snapping shots in bumper to bumper traffic. I was surprised how terrifying it was to pull over and wander up and down a shoulder on this completely familiar stretch of road. It wasn't familiar at all, and in fact, up close, it was pretty creepy. It made me feel exhilarated in a terrified way, but basically creepy and pretty much scared to death a sharp, heavy metal object was about to fly up from under someone's tires and impale me, or else I'd just be run over.

An equally interesting reaction, throughout this process of trying to capture some of these city/landscapes for reference, is how angry people can be when you let 10 yards of traffic lane get between you and the parked car in front of you.

My most excellent example of this was the guy in the maroon Mercury Sable, who just about lost it that I wasn't creeping up behind the car in front of me that literally wasn't moving like all the rest of the cars in the row before me. He layed on the horn. This is shocking obviously, because of the noise naturally, but really it was because of his urgency for us to move our cars up six feet. I engaged moving forward, and gestured to the fact that he really wasn't missing any forward progress, and this guy went ballistic, honking and girating in his driver's seat. I laughed. I laughed even harder when, in another such gap, he sped around me and then got directly in front of me to not move any faster or any more forward than I was, now one car length behind him. But really what struck me at this point was his license plate, which read, HOTZ 19.

I guarantee this is all HOTZ could see. I also have a feeling the beauty along this industrial corridor is utterly lost on a lot more people than HOTZ. I guess I just hope not, because this isn't as pretty a view as another that you could see.

The Idea continues.