South Side, 2008–2024: Notes on a Sixteen-Year Archive

I started going to the South Side of Chicago regularly in 2008, during a financial crisis that would reshape the city's neighborhoods for a generation. I did not know then that I would still be going sixteen years later. Long-term documentary work rarely announces itself as long-term — it arrives in days, and then weeks, and then you look up and realize you have been changed by a place.

What does sixteen years of documentary work produce? Thousands of photographs. A different understanding of time. A set of relationships that cannot be collapsed into journalism. And an archive that contains contradictions the photographer is no longer able to resolve, because the contradictions belong to the place itself.

The South Side I was photographing in 2008 was a neighborhood living with the aftermath of disinvestment — shuttered factories, schools closing, the particular exhaustion of communities that have been told repeatedly that help is coming and watched it not arrive. The people I photographed were not symbols of urban crisis. They were people managing a system that had been designed to work against them, with skill and humor and care.

By 2016, what had changed and what had not changed were equally important. The same streets. Different people on them. Different technologies making different kinds of precarity possible. The same deep structures of inequality, more visible now because they had become photogenic. I worried constantly about that: what it meant that poverty had become an aesthetic category in contemporary photography, and whether I was contributing to something that served the people I photographed or only served the viewers.

Long-term documentary work forces you to see your own assumptions. You arrive with a thesis and the thesis fails. You arrive with a frame and the frame is wrong. You spend years learning a place and then the place changes and your knowledge is partial again. This is not failure — it is the only honest condition for documentary work.

The archive I have made from sixteen years on the South Side contains approximately 1,200 frames that I consider finished photographs. It contains many more that are evidence — of process, of error, of things I saw but could not yet make visible. I do not know what to do with the evidence. For now, I keep it.

An archive is a different kind of argument than a photograph. A photograph says: this happened, here, at this moment. An archive says: I kept coming back. The return is the argument. It is also, maybe, a form of accountability.