Picture This

By Margaret Lyons in Miscellaneous on Aug 26, 2004 3:37PM

Picturing Chicago is gigantic. Any website that has a 24-page .pdf explanation in addition to its 5 page (also .pdf, wtf?) FAQ better actually need it. We’re not totally sure that Picturing Chicago needs such a labored explanation, but uh, there it is. The site is a “public history” project intended to create a “visual record of everyday life and the social order….It seeks to illuminate, or articulate, the macro level of social structure by photographing the micro, everyday life, level.” Wow. We’re going to stick with it just being a shitload (4,000+) of pictures.

The pictures themselves aren’t particularly amazing; they’re adequate, but the sheer number of them is overwhelming enough that they sort of don’t have to be good. They’re shot on film, almost all in black and white, which gives the pictures a gravitas they don’t actually deserve, but again, the artistic shortcomings are surprisingly tolerable. This isn’t a photography project, it’s a sociological visual history, and in that respect the project seems to be a success. We think? Either way, it’s cool.

That’s the thing about Picturing Chicago. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t really like about it, and we’d stop there except that we do like the overall product. We like the insane number of pictures. We like the explicit definitions of the neighborhoods. We like trying to guess what the pictures of our neighborhood are of, and we like being wrong about it. Yes, it’s a little on the pretentious side, and no, we don’t really like the web design either, but it’s so damn comprehensive that we’re still pretty into it.