The Lake Calumet Region: The Juxtaposition Between the Natural and Built Environment at the Graham Foundation, through November 20
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The exhibit was cosponsored by the Southeast Chicago Development Commission, a community organization. Kathy Dickhut, who helped organize the show, told me that its purpose is “pretty simple–just to show Chicagoans the assets and the beauty of the southeast side. There’s more natural areas there than anywhere else in the city.” Faust himself told me he was fascinated by the region’s richness: “There’s so much going on. If you only went across the Chicago Skyway you’d miss it–you’d look at it and say, ‘Oh, there’s just a bunch of junk down there.’ But it’s incredibly complex. If you started walking between any two points and reflected on what was going on, it would reveal all kinds of things.” One of Faust’s photos includes a tree gnawed down by a beaver: “How can there be a beaver here? That means there’s a habitat that isn’t all bad.”
Faust’s photos, in both color and black and white, are either 8 by 22 inches or 12 by 38. But unlike photographer Art Sinsabaugh in his midwestern landscapes, Faust doesn’t use a wide format to emphasize the land’s flatness. Nor is he concerned to make images that are stunning in themselves: “You’ll see very little of the ‘nature grand’ photographic tradition of an Ansel Adams,” he says. Instead Faust’s wide format captures the dynamic contradictions of the landscape itself. A photo of kids swimming off crumbling industrial structures–concrete piers and pillars, some partially submerged, at various levels of depth in the composition–reclaims for play a landscape more vertical than horizontal. In one picture, the mound of a landfill disrupts the flatness of the prairie and contrasts with the horizontal format; white metal tanks listing at various angles seem almost to have been arranged by a mildly demented landscape architect.
