In fall 1994, famed landscape and nature photographer Terry Evans took reluctant leave of Salina, Kan., her home for 26 years and the wellspring of her art, and moved to Chicago to join her husband, Sam, who had begun a job here the year before.
“I really dragged my feet. I didn’t want to come here,” said Evans. “It wasn’t anything against Chicago. It’s just that I felt like my whole identity as an artist was tied up in the Kansas prairie. I couldn’t imagine loving anyplace else as much or finding anything to photograph.”
But the transplantation took. More opportunities opened to her here, and she won new acclaim for her photographs of the western prairies, the former Joliet Arsenal land, and prairie specimens in the Field Museum collection.
And Chicago began to insinuate itself in her affections and, finally, her viewfinder.
Between March 2003 and August 2004, Evans undertook her first exploration of an urban landscape. The intrepid 60-year-old went sky-ward, her preferred vantage, some 50 times — in hot-air balloon, Piper Cub and helicopter — to capture in her Hasselblad the patterns and complexity of Chicago and interconnectedness of this region.
The result is “Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait,” which is both a large outdoor exhibit to run June 10 to Oct. 10 in Chicago’s Millennium Park and a companion book (Harry N. Abrams, 192 pages, $40). Even Chicagoans who have seen other bird’s-eye pictures of the city should appreciate the detail, patterns and use of shadow in Evans’ photographs, especially the 100 blown up to a 4-foot-square format for park display. She brings a painterly eye for composition and color to fens, savannas and parks as well as to blighted neighborhoods, abandoned mills and cookie-cutter subdivisions.
The title, “Revealing Chicago,” may suggest Evans is disclosing something new about the city to viewers, but the work is more about how the city revealed itself to her — as more colorful and more focused on the lakefront, for industry and recreation, than she had imagined.
“The lake is kind of an organizing principle and a release for the city,” she said in her Hyde Park studio. “As soon as I realized that, I knew how to organize the book. The book starts and ends with the lake. The lake frames the city in that way.”
Evans came relatively late to photography — surprising considering her father, Norman Hoyt, was a commercial photographer in Kansas City, Mo. She studied painting and drawing at the University of Kansas and didn’t seriously pick up a camera until her senior year there, in 1968. She borrowed one from her father to photograph Robert Kennedy on a campus visit and was inadvertently herded in with the working press.
“I learned a camera could be a ticket, access to a situation that you might not otherwise get to investigate,” she said.
In fall 1968, she married Sam Evans, whom she had met at KU, and they moved to Salina, in the heart of the wheat belt, where he joined his family’s grain business. In between the births of their two children, she kept up her photography, working with anti-poverty groups and documenting the poor in Kansas and Kansas City.
In 1976, Wes Jackson, a contrarian Kansas botanist and geneticist who had given up academe, founded the Land Institute in Salina. It was a think tank and experimental farm that espoused “natural systems agriculture,” using deep-rooted perennial crops that sustained themselves without chemicals or irrigation. The model was outside of town: the constantly replenishing virgin prairie.
Sam Evans became a board member (a seat now occupied by his wife), and the Evanses found their environmental, social and political values influenced by Jackson and the thinkers who visited his institute.
Jackson was impressed with Terry Evans from the start. “She is smart as a whip and has an independent mind,” he said. “She is secure in who she is, and so she doesn’t mind being blunt, but not cruel.”
In 1978, he asked her to photographically record the species diversity in the local prairie.
“When she pointed that camera down, it was an epiphany,” he said. “She began to see the texture of the prairie.”
Evans said until then her interest was in photographing people, not landscape. Her first walks in the prairie were in early March, when, she said, “everything started growing and emerging, and I started seeing this tremendous diversity. It was so different from looking at my front yard. I could look and there would be hundreds of different plants at my feet.”
She started to read all she could about the prairie, from grass systematics to Native American medicinal uses of indigenous plants. “Suddenly, I had come into my subject. It was a great gift,” she said.
When she later expanded her exploration to nearby Kansas farmland (the “inhabited prairie,” she termed it), she realized she couldn’t adequately see relationships or patterns from the ground. She began photographing from the passenger seat of a small plane owned by her husband’s firm.
“I didn’t have any trepidation [about flying], but I did get sick all the time. I don’t anymore,” she said. “But when I first started doing it, I would stay up with the pilot until I felt like I was going to throw up. Then I’d say, `We have to land now.'”
Sam Evans, now head of international and public policy work for the YMCA of the U.S.A. in Chicago, said his wife “learned from our pilots how to ask the right questions, how to read the weather and how to check a pilot out.”
That experience helped her in tackling the Chicago region.
The inspiration for the project was “Earth from Above,” the popular 2002 Millennium Park exhibit of aerial photography by France’s Yann Arthus-Bertrand. A board member of the Chicago-based conservation group Openlands Project was so enthused by it that he proposed Openlands back a similar treatment on the Chicago region.
Openlands director Gerald Adelmann had worked with Evans when she was photographing the Joliet Arsenal land, which was being transformed into a prairie, cemetery, landfill and industrial parks. He helped to get published her resulting 1998 monograph, “Disarming the Prairie.” In fall 2002, he offered and she accepted the Chicago assignment.
“She is a world-class photographer,” he said. “She also is passionate about the environment and conservation.”
He then enlisted two more sponsors: Chicago Metropolis 2020, a civic group promoting regional approaches to development, transportation and education, and Chicago’s Cultural Affairs Department. LaSalle Bank, Exelon Corp. and others covered the project’s tab, which Adelmann put at about $750,000.
To supplement Evans’ research, Adelmann began assembling in March 2003 all sorts of experts on the region to meet with her. Evans said many of the experts marked up large area maps with sites for her to shoot.
Evans used the maps as guides but acknowledged, “Often my best photographs were in between the lines, as it were, on the way to one of these sites.”
Flying in all seasons and coping with ever-shifting weather were challenges. She checked weather reports repeatedly and often scrubbed flights on short notice if the air wasn’t clear or the skies were too cloudy.
Her initial flights were in a hot-air balloon, mostly in the north and northwest suburbs. The balloon’s advantages were that it moved slowly and as low as she liked; its disadvantages were its direction couldn’t be controlled and its landing could be uncertain. Her only mishap in the project was when the balloon landed in a parking lot at a Crystal Lake-area mall and took out a row of shopping carts.
For more targeted suburban flights, she flew in the Piper Cub of area pilot Steve Keibler.
“She wanted to be up late in the day or early morning,” said Keibler. “She wanted the low sun angle so she could get those long shadows.”
Not allowed to fly a small plane or balloon through Chicago, Evans opted to shoot from a helicopter, a first for her. Because of the vibration of the craft, she had to attach a motion-stabilizer to her camera.
Her pilot, Keith Wilson of Wilco Helicopters Inc., said Evans would show up with heavy bags filled with cameras, films, stabilizer and warm clothes.
“She’s a powerful little thing. She carries those cameras with the strength of a linebacker,” he said. “Sometimes I wanted to carry her bag and she would say, `I got it.'”
For the park exhibit, the Duggal lab in New York printed Evans’ images on coated aluminum, more durable than the laminated paper used in prior Millennium Park photo exhibits. The aluminum sheets were shipped to Ravenswood Studio in Chicago, which is making frames that will set the photos at eye level.
Adelmann said the message the photos and accompanying text, by Charles Wheelan, are meant to convey is that “this is a very complicated and rich region that is very much interconnected, but it lacks the regional coordination that large municipal areas need to move into the future.”
He acknowledged that the message might be undercut because Evans makes even sprawl look attractive.
“One of the challenges is that she is such a fine artist that she can make anything look beautiful,” he said. “I hope people will see beyond the aesthetic to what is going on within the image.”
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cstorch@tribune.com
