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 "Click for larger image")
Chicago People
Richard Younker
Paper978-0-252-06993-2
$20.00
| Pub Date: | 2001 |
| Pages: | 184 pages |
| Dimensions: | 10 x 8.25 in. |
| Illustrations: | 85 Photographs |
Chicago prides itself on its liveliness. Here is Chicago life in all its vitality, vigor, and variation.
Here is the heart of Chicago. Not in the commercial dazzle of Michigan Avenue or the plush offices of Wacker Drive, but on the streets, at scrapyards and construction sites, in the shadow of boarded-up apartment buildings, and inside the churches and parks of ethnic neighborhoods where English is rarely spoken. In this powerful photodocumentary, Richard Younker reveals the "second city"--the shadowy sister of the glittering, guidebook Chicago--through the stories and riveting black-and-white images of its inhabitants. Many of the men and women depicted on these pages live on the edge, or close to it. Some survive by wit and cunning, some by violence, some by grinding, backbreaking work. But they are all survivors, and their stories, gritty and luminous, pulsate with the energy of that survival. These men and women tell of their commitment to work and family, of innocence and the loss of it, of homelessness, alcoholism, and the numbing shock of prejudice. These are the people who loaded your furniture into the moving van, drove the piles for Navy Pier, and fired the steam engines and pulled the switches in the Chicago railyard. Some are working toward a union pension; others are scrabbling to hold onto their "little piece of job." Younker takes us to the side door of a Polish Catholic church, to the barbershop and the boxing ring, to a dark corner of the city where "the coldest dealer in the neighborhood [is] a guy named Buddha." Street-corner musicians have their say, as do drug dealers and undercover cops, housewives and prostitutes, gang members and pool sharks, winos, conmen, and crooked election stewards. Etched in their faces and eloquent in their bodies and postures are the forces that animate their lives: hope and defiance, camaraderie and loneliness, exultation and a clawing despair. Their stories unnerve us. Their spirit moves us. Their eyes hold us and won't let go.
Subjects:
Chicago / Photography / Illinois / Midwest Regional
