I’m happy to share that two of my images from The White City series are part of F-Stop Magazine’s Group Exhibition in the Open Theme, Issue #72. There are so many outstanding images that are part of the group exhibition so be sure to take a scroll through them all.

This series came up a bit unexpectedly late last year. I was photographing from a friend’s condo in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood to create images for my Urban Quilt series and wasn’t having tremendous luck getting what I had envisioned. However, while I was shooting from her building’s 13th floor deck I noticed the Navy Pier Ferris Wheel peeking out from behind Lake Point Tower and loved the little hint of what lies beyond all the towering buildings.

Again, not getting the effect or mood I wanted with my usual post-processing I decided to play around with different presets in Nik Silver Efex Pro and came up with what you see here:

Definitely a different mood than what you usually see in my architectural work but I love this older, more vintage, moodier feeling in images.

At first I just thought this was something fun to play around with but when Stark Magazine asked to publish this in Issue.33 I had to come up with a title. The combination of the mood and Ferris Wheel quickly made me think of the novel The Devil In The White City by Erik Larson.

I hadn’t read this book in over 10 years but it’s one of my favorites and given my serious lack of skills in the writing/titling department, I thought it would be a good fit to pull a quote from the book as a title. So, above you have Make No Little Plans, the first image made for the series. Thank you Erik Larson for writing this book and Daniel Burnham for the great quote!

From here I quickly decided to reread the book and create a series of images based on the underlying theme and mood of the book. I pulled older images that I thought would fit with the series and created new images inspired by the reread. One of my favorites, other than the one above for the obvious reason of it being the first, is Vanishing Point below.

If you’d like to have a little more background on the series, here’s the project statement:

Inspired by Erik Larson’s novel The Devil In The White City, The White City series brings attention to beauty that resides in urban environments – such as architecture and urban landscaping – while honoring the darker undertones that linger in the underbellies of today’s modern cities. Beginning with the1893 World’s Fair, which is the focal point of Larson’s novel, the perception of urban environments began to shift and Daniel Burnham, the mastermind behind the design of the World’s Fair, spearheaded that shift, transforming Chicago from its industrial roots into an exquisite haven of beauty. Although most of the buildings that were part of the 1893 World’s Fair are long gone, Burnham’s influence on design and urban beautification is still evident in Chicago’s urban landscape today.