The film turned out amazingly well, given the near-nonexistent lighting in my roommate’s Miss Havisham/Blanche DuBois boudoir. I was struck by the adaptability of the film, its breadth, diversity of tone and light, the sheer richness of the images. These photographs look as if they were taken in another time–a history that extends far deeper than we, children of the Internet Age, can authentically grasp.

The story here isn’t much, though it could be–but to tell one story is to walk blind into a thicket of infinite branching, and to risk losing the source along the way. A short synopsis might read: old college friends get dressed up and stay in Brooklyn apartment because the bars are expensive and the trains and streets are cold. They drink wine, take photos, smoke cigarettes. The light is honey rose, falling on lace-shrouded surfaces, tumults of pale plastic flowers, bright copper weaves. Nomi the kitten (after the Showgirls heroine) slinks in and out of the curling smoke and wrestles the silver jewelry stand to the floor with a crash.

I am so grateful to have these photos. I do not bemoan what they do not capture: the lights of the city upside down in the East River; the bathroom graffiti in Lucy’s bar on Ave. A, Mars Bar, last surviving bastion of the old anarchic/punk spirit of the Lower East Side. I’m not sorry for these or any other photos I did not take. Herein is testament to one of the many entities Time and all our machinations have, without epitaph or homage, quietly buried. Thank you, Jon Wohlfert, for undertaking this project and film, and raising my awareness of yet another casualty to technological ‘progress.’ We need more librarians, archivists, documentarians. Without them the past is dead, and no one will have even noticed it go.

The area near the high wires are a specific place for me also.  It is the only place I know of in which electricity going through wires is extremely audible.  It is a strange sound, even stranger still that
something so common to those in a more populated area would have to be some place like here to really hear it, and certainly a foreign sound to hear in such a landscape.  I had to take these pictures quickly because I was in someone’s driveway.  As soon as I started shooting, they needed to leave, so I had to as well.

Getting used to seeing the near-constant mountains has been strange for me, as well as the expanses of flat, nearly wrinkled land.  I’m afraid I over-included them, but they are enormous, and they are Boulder (though a few are actually of downtown Denver). Other places pictured are areas on the campus of the university of Colorado at Boulder.  The architecture has a greek feel to it, and you can tell by the obliquely placed solar panels in front of Mackey auditorium (where I sneak down to the basement to play on the university’s pianos-I am not a student there) that it is eco-conscious even at the risk of looking not entirely geometrically perfect (as most of this area of Colorado is).  

By the freaky buffalo mascot/statue is probably a tour group.  I don’t know them.  Some pictures are also on the walking mall in downtown Boulder.  It’s not a place I particularly like, but a place that defines Boulder - with carved rocks for children to play on and a light “fountain” (to not waste water), it truly is an odd bit of Americana and certainly not of the type that is usually imagined.

This place is odd, and I haven’t gotten used to it yet.  Light at night acts more like fallen dust on the ground, and all the right angles and perfectly straight telephone poles make me think I am living in an architectural model rather than a real place.  I haven’t gotten used to it yet, and I don’t think I will, but it’s alright for the moment.  And the people here are pretty nice.  Oh, and that star is this stupid christmas light-ed thing they place on the side of the mountain in the winter.  It’s totally cheesy, and I hate it now, but I’ll probably think of it as an oddly defining thing in a few years…

-Katie Konrad

You can see some of Katie’s excellent video work here.

all pictures were shot in the logan square, humboldt park, and garfield park neighborhoods of chicago.

My favorite archives were found in the Library of Congress, with their World War II Industrial and Rosie the Riveter photos. So, I’m definitely a feminist and could go in to the original use of Rosie in these photos and the intention of use of an all female, modern girl gang to replace all the factory workers in the chosen photos I re-presented, but mostly, in this instance, I think that placing a glaring light on the construction of the archive itself, the medium through which this history was documented, is always already in any use of the medium thereafter. I hope that the hyper obvious and playfully constructed reenactments helps to highlight the origins, intentions, purposes, and canon of work that has become a part of the medium’s definition.

I also took this idea, seeing that much kodachrome of the past was used to document industry and city scape around parts of Chicago’s industrial complexes. I tried to choose images of the city that could have been also documented in the height of kodachrome’s industrial use, or that I feel are a modern representation of similar things. And for a while I went up to different factory workers on break and tried to get them to let me take direct portraits of them. They were all super bashful. The closest I got was the turned back of the stretching man watching the giant heart-shaped concrete slab swinging from machinery.

In the end, I also really love my friends and wanted to take some semi-glorifying, beautifully color-rich photos of them.

Whitney’s Chicago pictures can be found in her first post, here.