Architectural works. Siskind, also, practiced this art before coming to I.D. and proceeded to encourage his students to record the important buildings of Chicago to the best of the camera’s ability.

Richard Nickel and Patrice Grimbert are known to the photographic community in Chicago as accomplished architectural photographers. Both men died prematurely in the early 1970s, but their work has served to inspire recent students, such as Bob Thall and Paul Hickman, to carry on the tradition of fine architectural photography.Art Sinsabaugh’s work from the 1960s presents a singular vision of the Midwest, whether it be Chicago or the Illinois Prairie. His interest in the landscape as miniature has led him to create photographs with an Asian flavor, suggesting tiny scroll paintings which have been unrolled for the viewer. A special 12 x 20 inch view camera is, in part, responsible for this unique portrayal of the Midwest.

Chicago photography of the last few years appears to favor this wide-angle view of the world, though Sinsabaugh’s format is not directly imitated. Dave Avison, Rusty Culp, and Laura Vokerding have all produced interesting work by exploiting the camera’s ability to see more than is humanly possible.Joseph Jachna and Kenneth Josephson have continued to work and teach in Chicago since the late fifties. Individually, they are very strong photographic artists; their styles seem to have little to do with each other. But within each body of work there is much which relates to the characteristic camera vision, or photographic realities, of the Chicago School. Jachna’s style is much closer to the mystical, borrowing from the poetic vision of Siskind, his teacher. He has discovered many ways of allowing the camera to reveal the mysterious relationship of light to water. In Jachna’s prints, innocent rocks which by chance occupied a previously benign body of water are transformed by light and take on sinister, sometimes extraterrestrial, qualities. Cloud forms and strobe-lit landscapes are materials for Jachna’s mystical visions. Mirrors, too, have proven important aids in Jachna’s pursuit of provocative images.Josephson’s work, on the other hand, exhibits a preoccupation with the concept of picture-making.

He investigates the relationship of colored postcard images to black and white prints, and postcard images as they relate to larger black and white images of the same sites, though perhaps at different seasons of the year. He delights in the fact that photography can be used to point out the absurdities of human endeavors (his archaeological series is in this vein). In his more traditional prints and in his mixed media assemblages, Josephson attempts to make us aware of the ways in which photography, now pervasively used for mass communication, has changed our way of thinking. He pushes the medium to its furthest limits with images that are intellectually and esthetically stimulating – in the tradition of Moholy-Nagy. They represent a strange mixture of the Bauhaus, Surrealism, and the American Midwest.Since the late 1960s, Barbara Crane, an I.D. graduate currently teaching at the School of the Art Institute, has done especially interesting sequential work with contact prints. One group, which she calls “Happenings,” is a series of bizarre, almost cinematic, records of incidents revealed as only the camera allows. Another group, “Petite Choses,” includes images chosen for the patterns they form when printed in juxtaposition and in miniature, negative size.

The black and white vignettes of Charles Traub, on the faculty at Columbia College since his graduation from I.D. in 1971, frequently deal with human behavior on Chicago beaches in the summer months. But his camera reveals only fragments of the human body, often torsos, and relates them to the larger environment. In recent work Traub has extended his interests to the realm of the totally abstract. He manipulates water, rock, and sand in ways reminiscent of Siskind, Callahan, and Jachna. Out of this tradition he creates completely new pictures which suggest the real, while evoking curiosity and disbelief.The nude has long been a favorite subject for photographers. The Chicago School has found it to be a valuable source for creative work, rather than erotic imagery. Jane Wenger’s work provides an example of some of the more inventive variations on this theme to come out of Chicago. In her series, “Self Portraits,” the knowledge that the model and the photographer are one gives the vision another twist, removing it even further from reality.

The reality of Patricia Carroll’s art is revealed in color, through the magic of neon lights, the camera and the cibachrome printing process. Her fragments from the night take on other-worldly dimensions. She intensifies the atmospheric effects by enhancing either the very warmest or very coolest hues first found at the “scene.” Waves of heat seem to radiate from one of her poolside views, which is almost exclusively red and black. Such an environment makes the viewer uncomfortable because it is familiar and, at the same time, beyond the realm of our experience.