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By Root 181 0

of a woman in a North Side bar called Slow Down Life’s Too Short and the emptied contents of her purse, which include a disposable camera, an address book, a pack of Marlboro Lights, a cell phone, a makeup case, a wallet, keys (to her motorcycle, car, bike lock, and apartment), a credit card, and sunglasses—the daily accoutrements of life in America. There are portraits of two waitresses, one with a nose ring, at the South Side restaurant Soul Queen; a group of Ethiopian Jews celebrating the Sabbath; two Mexican-Americans dancing at a rodeo in Pilsen; four Knights of Columbus members dressed in feathered fezzes, capes, and sashes; and Rex, a toothless, smiling homeless man in a Laborers’ Union baseball cap.

But people also see themselves in these photos: an entire world reflected in one place, in one city. In Beirut, a woman looking at an image of two veiled Muslim women standing by Lake Michigan asked, “Isn’t that the Corniche?” In Bombay, a cleaning woman in her sari took Judge’s hand and walked her over to a picture of a nine-year-old girl about to be baptized at the Unity of Love Missionary Baptist Church on the city’s South Side; she pointed first to the shower-cap-clad girl, and then to herself. An Indian diplomat translated: “She’s trying to tell you she’s Christian. That she was baptized.” In Tunis, a middle-aged man looking at an image of a young Puerto Rican man with his wife’s name, Natalie, shaved into his hair, mumbled, “Oh, I hope my son doesn’t see that.” One of the favorites is from Horan’s collection, a portrait of two teenage friends on their way home from school: One girl is a Somali, wearing a traditional head scarf, and the other is from Thailand.

For Cahan, the project had from the beginning seemed like an opportunity to freeze-frame America, and what better place to do that than in Chicago. Ordered and bedraggled. Excessive and austere. Familiar and foreign. An imperfect city, a city of quixotic quests and of reluctant resignation. A city that was, Algren once wrote, the product “of Man’s endless war against himself.” These are Chicago’s truths but they are also, after all, America’s truths, and they always have been.

I’ve heard it suggested that Chicago is passé. The steel mills have closed. Public housing is coming down. The mob has been dismantled. And, Chicago is no longer hog butcher to the world. Even the city’s one claim to edginess, Playboy magazine, has picked up shop and moved. “I love Chicago,” the magazine’s new editor who’s now based in New York told a reporter. “It’s my second favorite city.” The city, though, always finds a way to move on: Now, for example, with more than a hundred sweets manufacturers, it has become the world’s candy capital. (As I write, two large confectioners have announced their closing; it is, indeed, a city in motion.)

When Comer first considered his project, it was because he’d been struck by the vast physical changes here, but in the end, what he captured was a people—a people evolving, a people shifting and changing, a people finding their way. I asked Comer why he thought the photographs of Chicago had become such an attraction abroad. “Because,” he replied simply, “the place is real.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Tony Fitzpatrick, Kale Williams, Andrew Patner, Nancy Drew, Julie Aimen, Isabel Wilkerson, Rachel Reinwald, John Houston, Dan Kotlowitz, Melissa Fay Greene, Amy Dorn, and my wife’s family. A grateful nod to This American Life and The Atlantic, where I had told much of the Cicero story before, and to Chicago Public Radio, where I first told of meeting Milton Reed. Of course, with gratitude and for their patience: Ed Sadlowski, Millie Wortham, Brenda Stephenson, Milton Reed, Andrea Lyon, Bob Guinan, John Celikoski, and Dave Boyle.

Thanks to my friends Alice Truax, who, with her usual grace and exactness, nudged me when my storytelling was out of whack; Kevin Horan, who kept me from going off half-cocked; and Tim Samuelson, who kept me from getting it wrong. (Any errors, of course, are my own doing.) And to Studs Terkel, whose friendship