Richard Cahan is winding down his job of coordinating CITY 2000, a photographic documentary chronicling a year in the life of the city and its people. The project, funded by the non-profit Comer Foundation, dispatched more than 100 photographers into every neighborhood of the city. The shooting ends Dec. 31, and an exhibit will open the next day at the Chicago Cultural Center. Cahan will then shift to the next phase of the effort: organizing the archive of hundreds of thousands of images and the information that goes with them. Cahan, who is an author and a former newspaper photo editor, is not sure what he will do to top this unique project. Here, he talks about the joys and discoveries of the yearlong odyssey.
Q: What did the city tell you after a year of collecting images and stories?
A: I have always heard that the city was a diverse city of neighborhoods and I always thought that was half propaganda and half truth. But I realized that it really is a unique U.S. city in that most of it is organized, much of it, around ethnic and religious and distinct groupings of people and these neighborhoods have an effect both on the people who live there and on the city itself. More and more we are tending to organize cities around lifestyles. So people in Wicker Park are interested in young people’s pursuits and entertainment and Lincoln Park people are grouped together because of the type of lifestyle that they all maintain. But much of the city is really grouped by people who need and want to be together. That was eye-opening. It showed me that the myth was true.
Q: That sounds like a very new version of an old Chicago story.
A: I think it is a historic reality, and I think that other cities have started to lose that more and more. I hear from people in New York that it is not a city of groupings of people who have chosen to be together. I think this is a unique part of America and one that we really enjoyed capturing. The other thing I learned this year is the power of photography. When we have shown our pictures to people, I can see the effect that they have, that they are truly a mirror of life. It is such an old invention, going back to the 1830s, but there is still such wonder and such joy that many people have in seeing themselves or their community. We put pictures up in the Austin branch library and the reaction of people to just seeing their own community was joyful. I have always loved photography since I was young, and I have realized its impact again.
Q: What kind of logistical challenges did the project present?
A: The biggest challenge was to find the right people and to find people who were willing to put their careers on hold for the year that it took to put the project together. I was amazed that almost everybody saw this year as a “wow,” and they were happy to take that chance. We were working with people who had full-time jobs, and we were asking them to leave their jobs and spend one year on this and then go back to reality. I was amazed that people caught the utopian idea of the project, and they were willing and happy to do it. I think the other challenge was to gain access into places. I was used to working on the Sun-Times, and when you work on a newspaper it is usually the name of the institution that gets you in. We had no name. We were telling our story to everybody we met. We must have told our story to 50,000 people this year, but I was amazed how, once we did explain that it was a time capsule, that they opened themselves up and gave us access we couldn’t believe. Everything from shooting inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field to spending 12 days at Cook County Jail to a mental health facility for one day on the North Side. We have been determined. We keep calling and explaining our story and meeting with people, and we have taken “no” as an answer very few times. I think when people understood we were determined to do things right, they opened themselves up. I can’t tell you how many times a photographer has said to me, “I can’t believe we are here.” They are so thrilled.
Q: What kind of technology did you use for the project, traditional cameras or digital?
A: We didn’t want to use digital because we thought in a few years we could do it all digitally, but it was a little cumbersome and a little worrisome about where we would store all this digital information. We are using all old technology with negatives. I don’t think that there is any form, no carrier of information, stronger than a photo negative, that in this little tiny frame you can pack millions and millions of bits of information. So we stuck with that. But the types we used ranged from 100-year-old 8 by 10s to Advantex cameras that people buy at stores. One of our favorites was a Holga camera, a $12 plastic camera that produces wonderful medium-range images. What I learned more than anything else is that it is not the camera, it is the photographer. And it’s not even the photographer, it is the purpose of the photographers when they go out to shoot.
Q: Do you think CITY 2000 will provide a template for other cities?
A: I hope so. I think that it is really important for people to document themselves, whether with a camera or with words, and a camera is one of the most efficient ways to do it. But we also did it with a video camera and audio recorders. A great photographer can come back with more information in one day than almost anyone can, even more than a writer can. That old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, it’s true. The photographer comes back from a story and he is done with it. A writer has to come back and decide how to present it. The photographer decides what to capture. You press a shutter and a 60th of a second later you have just captured an awful lot of information. I don’t want to be cast as a photo person. I am not a photo person. I am a journalist. What we did was true journalism from the standpoint that we were creating a journal. Going back to that word “journal,” that is what newspapers try to do. We created a yearbook of life in the year 2000 and life in Chicago.
Q: What are the historical antecedents to this project?
A: In the 1800s, Paris documented itself, but it was mostly a documentation of the physical city. I think that I considered this project as one reaching back to the Farm Security Administration photos of the ’30s. My personal favorites are Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. I have read a lot of their works and looked at a lot of their work. I look back at those pictures, and I am amazed at the power. They seem to get better with the passage of time. The older they get, the more powerful they are. Some people think that we are a day in the life of Chicago times 365, but I don’t see that because the day in the life series is also surface, and because we had a year, we wanted to go deep instead of surface, surface, surface. We tried to understand situations and people and issues and work at it that way, instead of just repeating ourselves every day. As an example, one of our photographers photographed a family of day laborers and spent months with them. Wes Pope spent much of the year documenting technology and learning more about it as he went along. He documented our love affair of the rectangular screen, from TV to computers to palm pilots. As the year matured, I think he understood the issue better.
Q: Sounds as if you had anyone’s dream job. How do you move on from that?
A: We have been focused so much this year on getting to Dec. 31 that we haven’t thought that much about what I am going to do next. I don’t want to walk away from this whole project. I would like to continue on in some way. My first responsibility is that I will work for six months next year creating a book based on our work and working to place all of our pictures in context. We are going to really try to attach all the information we can to all the pictures we took so people 50 years from now will understand the context of the photos. We hope to look at all the negatives again and look at them with a year’s worth of perspective.
Q: What will be the last photo of the year?
A: We keep talking about it. We are not sure. We are just going to let our photographers figure that out. They have figured out much of the year. One of our best, most famous pictures, is a picture of a view camera looking at the sunrise from the roof of our building. I would love to take the sunset on Dec. 31, if you can see it. We are going to talk about it. We usually decide things as a group. I am sure sometime next week we will get together and figure this out.
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This is an edited transcript.
