Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [50]
So, what to do with all these photographs? For two and a half months they were shown at the city’s Cultural Center in the Loop, where they were visited by twenty-five thousand people, a respectable number for exhibitions there. Then the five hundred thousand negatives were collected for storage at the library of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The collection has never found its rightful place in the city.
Both Comer and Cahan have moved on. Comer grew up on the South Side—his father was a conductor for the Illinois Central Railroad—and during the CITY 2000 year, he visited the elementary school he’d attended. The students are now all African-American, and mostly poor. He asked the principal, “How are they treating you?”
“Beg your pardon?” the principal replied.
“Are you getting everything you need?”
In fact, the principal told Comer, they had new computers that were sitting idle because the school wasn’t properly wired. Comer paid to have that done, and he has since made the well-being of the Paul Revere Elementary School an ongoing priority. He has also provided funding for the South Shore Drill Team, whose director is the school’s disciplinarian; two hundred fifty kids participate, and there are another hundred on the waiting list. They’re a crowd favorite at the Bud Billiken Day Parade. As for Cahan, he opened a store in Evanston, the suburb just north of the city. It’s called CityFile, and it sells rare books on Chicago as well as photographs, memorabilia, and original art. Cahan’s running out of money, though, and when I last saw him he told me he would probably close soon. But one of his final gestures was to hold an exhibition, the first in the city, of Robert Guinan’s work. In Paris, there’s a tradition that on weekends artists will drop by their galleries to meet with art-seekers, and so, for a month, Guinan visited Cahan’s store each Saturday afternoon and held court. A number of visitors, thinking Guinan lived in Paris, asked him how often he visited Chicago. Another began speaking to him in French. “All I could say is ’Où est le téléphone?’ ” he said. “It’s the only French I know.”
Guinan would undoubtedly identify with the fate of CITY 2000, for the project has resurfaced far from Chicago. In September 2001, the city entered one hundred thirty-five of the photographs in the International Photography Festival in Aleppo, Syria, and the show opened on September 11—the day the world’s axis shifted. Valentine Judge, who works for the city and was traveling with the exhibition, told the Syrians that “in these pictures you see the faces of the fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers of the people killed in the World Trade Center. This is what America looks like.” People were drawn to the photographs, which were the hit of the festival, and so the U.S. State Department chose to take these images of Chicago around the world—more precisely, to the places where America is viewed with some hostility. So far they have been exhibited in India, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Brazil, Jordan, Thailand, and Malaysia. The pictures continue to make their way around the globe.
People, after all, like looking at people, and peeking in at American life. A photograph of a rather large woman in a body-clinging dress often gets puzzled looks, presumably because obesity is not a common sight in most Third World countries. Passersby look on in amusement at a diptych