“Aerial artistry: Photographer takes to the skies to explore Chicago’s remarkable landscape. She’s not in Kansas anymore”
Terry Evans is back on the ground.
The famed landscape and nature photographer spent much of the last two years preparing for, shooting and producing a major aerial portrait of this region. The result, “Revealing Chicago,” was an outdoor exhibition last summer and fall in Millennium Park that was a critical and popular success.
Reached at her Chicago studio, Evans said she had only recently started photographing again, exploring by foot remnants of oak savannas in Illinois and Wisconsin. She has been using a panoramic camera, a format she hasn’t used much before. She also has been shooting in the area near her former home, Salina, Kan.
“The [Chicago] project was so big,” she said. “What I need to do now is look closely at nature and the world in a small, attentive way.”
She also has begun doing portraits of people at some of the Chicago-area sites she photographed from the air. It’s her way, she said, “to deepen the Chicago story.”
“Revealing Chicago” is being seen again. More than 60 of the 100 large-format images that were shown in the park have been donated to the city’s Department of Aviation. A lengthy exhibition of them is expected to begin next month at O’Hare.
Some 130 original paper prints and related production material are to be archived at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said Gerald Adelmann, executive director of the Openlands Project, a conservation group that co-sponsored the Millennium Park exhibition. He said that material may be used for a traveling shows in this region and perhaps in Chicago’s Sister Cities abroad.
