By Michael Miner
The first public display of the project’s pictures will hang just a few days in the gallery at CITY 2000’s headquarters, at 312 N. May. But in March the project takes over the city’s gallery in the old Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, where you’ll be able to see a constantly changing sampling of the thousands of photos that will be taken of Chicago throughout the year.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Presumably this mother lode of information will fascinate scholars in a thousand years. Cahan has no idea how it will survive that long, since the technology for preserving it in a useful form doesn’t exist. “There is no answer for a thousand years,” he says. “The answer is to save it for 50 years and see what’s around then.”
CITY 2000 is a gift to Chicago from Gary Comer, the founder of Lands’ End and an amateur photographer. Last June he hired Cahan away from the Sun-Times, where he’d been photo editor, to run it. When we talked a few days ago, Cahan was thinking about the first sunrise of the millennium and how many photographers he should assign to take it. He wants a photographer at the top of the Sears Tower and another at the bottom of the Deep Tunnel, but now he wonders if there’ll be anyone down there then to photograph. He wants pictures of people welcoming the millennium at parties around the city–“We hope to be at the Casino Club, but we haven’t gotten in there yet”–coming home by cab and CTA, sleeping and eating breakfast.
Last week Cahan invited Ira Glass of This American Life to talk to the photographers about serendipity. “They said, ‘How do you get your stories?’ And he said, ‘I follow my instincts to people I think are interesting.’” Glass’s advice reminded them of why they became photographers in the first place. “Pretty inspiring,” says Cahan.
“Nuts! No ‘Peanuts,’” New York Daily News.
“Beethoven will lose his best friend, the Little Red-Haired Girl will be gone forever, and Lucy Van Pelt won’t have her favorite Blockhead to torment anymore.” Baltimore Sun.
