DEWensel Images

Nothing announced it or attributed it to anyone or anything. It looked broken or disrupted but it remained very potent. It was a powerful but incomprehensible memento with an extraordinary presence. I shot it twice on consecutive days.

This memento’s meaning seems more apparent: a dream subverted just before its realization. The ongoing power of that derailed dream was evidenced in scrupulous care over many years of the externalities and fading outlines of the dream’s promise. I made photographs over the course of several visits spanning two years, intending to capture the memento’s impact and to celebrate the impulse to memorialize and pay homage, and to honor the need, in spite of defeat, to keep alive in some tangible manifestation, what might have been. Last winter I went to shoot the house again, but it had been demolished and the yard scraped clear.

In the counties at the limit of Chicago's suburban sprawl is an edge marking the transition from a concentrated urban/suburban landscape to an agrarian landscape. Along this edge, ghost houses and keepsake Dodges cohabitate with cooling towers and wind turbines. Downstate rural themes are woven into the landscape despite close proximity to Chicago's sprawl.

Selections from Rural Studies

There is disquiet in everything. I went looking for the dark in gardens and in the meadow and found, with a little coaxing, the uneasiness everywhere. 

Compass Plant from the Dark Garden Series

More noir from Chicago. I love the world from under the overpass. Crews were repainting the steel beams and had wrapped portions of the structure in heavy work cloth giving the view of the billboard woman an elicit feel as if through partly drawn curtains. 

Photographer's titles for their photographs can piss you off or sometimes, maybe, they can enrich the take on the work. Robert Adams added the qualifier "Remodeled" to the otherwise prosaic title he used for a shot of one of the tract houses he photographed in Colorado probably to make sure that more of the audience got the humor in the shot. So maybe you like the shot below just because its kinda interesting or spooky or it has nice colors. But if I told you that the title is "I'll be up in a minute to say goodnight." wouldn't you find it a bit more interesting?

Farm House on Big Timber Road west of Elgin IL

Then there is Chicago's rich vein of noirish alleys and down on their luck types on their way to someplace else who are like props in a Nicholas Ray lonely place. This is my favorite Chicago Alley and these are some of my favorite characters.

Their Alley - Van Buren Street Chicago IL

http://www.outdoorphotographer.com/locations/north-america/back-to-b-and-w.html#.U9A_vIBdUqg

A serendipitous decision to follow a single lane track off of the A82 led me down Glen Etive and gave me a day of shooting I'll never forget. While the vistas were stunning, my best finds were "small" shots overlooked at first sight. The foam from falls on the River Etive formed endless patterns and swirls in a calm section of the stream before being whisked over another drop.  

Water Study I, River Etive in the Highlands, 2014

I’ve changed the face of the meadow running alongside Hwy 55 in north central Wisconsin through a small shift in emphasis and fundamentally changed the import through the addition of a human prop (my nephew Christian). Everything remains the same and everything has changed.