My friend Joe and his awesome scanner camera were out at the Milwaukee Museum of Art on Friday taking portraits as part of Cedar Block Presents: Jan Lievens on a Jet Plane. See the rest of the portraits here.

1810 W. Cortland photo by Kristen Heldmann, noted only to avoid the confusion ensuing from taking a photo of a building where a guy who took photos of buildings lived

This past fall I became familiar with the life and work of Richard Nickel, a Chicago photographer who made it his life work to preserve elements of Louis Sullivan buildings being demolished throughout the city in the mid-20th century. He photographed the buildings and collected physical artifacts from the demo sites, terra cotta ornament and even staircases. He died quite young while he was doing just this in the Chicago Stock Exchange building while it was being torn down. He was buried under rubble for a few weeks before his body was recovered. The arch of the Stock Exchange is on display behind the Art Institute next to Grant Park, and it stands as a quiet monument to Nickel, I think, for people interested in Chicago history and Nickel’s important work.

There’s a new book out on him as of 2007 and a couple of his photographs were displayed in the Lasalle Bank collection at the Cultural Center this past fall, but his work is primarily seen as architectural and technical, and not in the tradition of art (although he did study under Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan at the Institute of Design), so as a photographer, he falls into a subdued place in history. The earnest story of his life and his gorgeously-correct large format photographs were captivating to me and the work done by Richard Cahan and John Vinci make the work very accessible in book form. I was enchanted enough by what I had read to find the building that he bought and renovated before his death, the only place he had called home outside of his parents’ house in the suburbs (which isn’t to say that he was unworldly - he had been a photographer for the army after WWII) to see what had become of it. I took my meager, distorted 35mm shot of the building (seen above) and noted with some amusement that the recent tenants of the storefront had been photographers.

I was reminded again of Richard Nickel’s home again tonight after a fellow city resident and photographer, Noah Vaughn, noticed my photo of it. Wondering how one might find this photo in the archives of my photostream, I googled “Grimm’s bldg,” the name that one sees in the ornament above the second floor. I sadly found this .pdf file that indicates that this building is in danger of demolition itself. It’s one of 7 buildings on preservationchicago.org listed as most endangered.

This is, of course, terrible news.  I hope it doesn’t get torn down, but I’m glad to have seen it when I did should it ever make way for some characterless condo complex not unfamiliar to the changing neighborhood.

Read more about Richard Nickel on NPR.

Yesterday, walking out the door to the library of all places, the mail carrier handed me a priority pack from my sister containing the book she recently published in conjunction with her Jail gallery show called Of Course and Never. Happy to have something new and anticipated to look at while on the 15 minute train ride to the Harold Washington Library, I was also amused by the coincidence. I had been meaning to go to the library all week and had only just found the time; here was an entire book provided to me that was acting as a primer for my library experience, introducing aesthetic and philosophical ideas to the outing. As you can see from these images, or in larger form on her website, this series of paintings by Wendy consists entirely of images of library book stacks in various states of disarray. “Tomes slump in their shelves, books lie in unintelligible piles on the floor, and periodicals are strewn across aisles, defying the organizing principles that make their contents accessible.”

Of Course and Never is a beautifully-made book and the accompanying text by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is superb, with thoughtful passages on the nature of books and libraries and a lovely introduction to Wendy’s paintings that gives the reader both a physical sensation of the work outside of reproduction and a literary starting point from which to view the images that follow.

One might think that a book accompanying a gallery show might only be a preview of the show, a kind of souvenir, but the number of paintings in the book is only one less than the show itself; it generously provides 17 handsome color plates. The overall effect of the paintings and the text make it a book worth revisiting often, I can already tell, and while I would be happy to add any volume of my sister’s work to my library (as she is both my sister and an artist whom I admire), I am doubly happy to have this book on my shelf.

More information on the book can be found here. Wendy’s solo exhibition at Jail Gallery will be up until March 14th. Read more about it on her website.

I know no pleasure like that of books, yet I read very little. Books are the entryway to dreams, but people at ease in life don’t need such introduction to enter into conversation with dreams. I could never read a book and give myself over to it; always, with each step, the commentary of my intellect or my imagination interrupts the narrative sequence. After some minutes I am the one who writes and the writing is nowhere to be seen.

Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon

I recently updated the Chicago section on my portfolio website. Before I had attempted some kind of visual consistency, but now I’ve just included my favorite photos and I think that’s a better way to string it. Shooting in this city represents so much to me — historical approaches, multiple perspectives, moments of photojournalism, memorable strangers, sudden adventures, like a friend getting stuck below the wall of the frozen lake in mid-February — that I have no interest in expressing a visual style here yet, and I enjoy the juxtaposition that each new roll of film presents. It reminds me that the enjoyment of taking pictures is the exploration of a place and the ideal feeling of that exploration is a naivete, almost a blindness in the moment to savor that hyper-vision later as the images are picked over.

Last night while scanning some images in a lab, I overheard the person next to me share a discovery regarding an image that he had taken while traveling last summer. He had taken a photograph of the back of a man’s calves because there were two monochrome and rather unassuming, symmetrical tattoos the size of a palm on each leg. When the photographer was taking the photo, he was unable to stop long enough to decipher the tattoos, he seemed to be standing behind the man while on an escalator as the legs are about halfway up the image. But when he scanned the image last night, he finally saw them in all their medium-format glory: they were visual representations of two mountain climbs the man had done, the name of the mountain and the height achieved by those very legs on which the tattoos were affixed.

One of my favorite bloggers, Kate Miss, and one of my new favorite photographers and bloggers, Lane Collins, both unexpectedly wrote lovely blog posts about receiving my mailing list photos. In addition to being talented artists and an excellent source of visual material, these two are just so nice and genuine. It makes my heart all warm to be a part of their good taste!

It’s been kind of a crazy week or two in Chicago. The governor of Illinois was, like, kicked out of office. There was a significant fire at Holy Name Cathedral yesterday, a place I was planning on going one of these upcoming Sundays for their intense 3:30 pipe organ performance. The papers finally reported on the pistol-whipping muggings that have been going on in my neighborhood. The Bean, um, has recently been slightly vandalized. And a few other news items that are really much too gruesome for your casual glances, readers.

The Bean must remain perfect, of course, so this is a big deal in Chicago. The Bean (a work actually titled “Cloud Gate” by Anish Kapoor) is one of those weird sculptures that you get SO SICK of in a photographic way, but yet, it still draws even the most homegrown Chicagoans in snapping their lenses. Millenium Park is actually pretty cool. It was one of those things that I didn’t expect when moving back to Chicago. When I left, right after the turn of the century, the park was still under construction. Right now, there’s some free ice skating that I should really take advantage of. In the summertime, there’s free music in the Gehry Pavilion and kids from all areas of the city and beyond are seen running madly through the Crown Fountain (by Jaume Plensa).

But yeah, the poor Bean. I’d be interested to know how often other high profile public art gets vandalized. When I was a teenager in Grand Rapids, MI, we would frequent the lawn of an office building downtown near the Calder sculpture. On that lawn was a Mark di Suvero piece, whose real interest to us was the fact that it was an industrial-sized tire swing (a large tire being held in suspension horizontally, rather than vertically, and cut open) in which two or three teenagers could easy fit. Inside the tire swing, the tire walls were painted yellow, and on top of that yellow paint was a thick layer of Sharpie marker graffiti. It was lovely to us, but had the added effect of being almost invisible to a passerby who might admire the three I-beams that rested into each other to make the tripod from which the tire swung. We also did quite a bit of smoking and littering on Michael Singer’s sculpture by the river. Clearly, this is what public art is for?

The mailing list photos have been mailed and should arrive shortly. In the meantime, check out these marvelous darkrooms shot by Richard Nicholson on a 4 x 5 camera (via JSTN). I’d like to make a crisper and updated image of my darkroom soon.