"Night Photography!" I said to myself, "how exciting!" I went out to take some photographs at night in my neighborhood, but when I got back and looked through them, I found myself uninspired. My neighborhood, Wicker Park, is not one that seems full of nighttime secrets, at least, not anymore. Wicker Park is a neighborhood full of people who come and go at all hours. It has 24-hour establishments, 4 AM bars, drunks and crazies and hipsters who roam the streets whenever they please, beautiful bright lights and neon signs, and little dark corners full of trash and piss.

Whatever the time, there are people out and about, and I've been one of them at all of those times. I have taken lots of pictures of Wicker Park at night, and it was one of the first places that enchanted me as a Chicago neighborhood when I was a bright eyed and bushy tailed high school student visiting its bygone punk houses and feeling like sitting on the corner was, like, totally part of a connection with the world, man. (ok, I didn't really talk like that, but looking back that is kind of how i felt even if i articulated it differently)

Anyway, I guess what I am getting at here is, Wicker Park has lost some of its magic for me. And not because gentrification is changing it, but just because it's become so familiar - even at night. Many other Night Photography praxes fascinated me because they were that player's first real glimpse into their neighborhood at night, the first time they really paid attention to those places they'd only ever quickly passed by on their way home. But I feel like I've always paid a lot of attention to Wicker Park in the wee hours. When I looked at the pictures from my first attempt at this task, they felt dull. When I went out a second time, specifically seeking out things I thought would be especially interesting to photograph, I felt like I was trying too hard to *force* it.

And yet I still wanted to do this task. What could I do to bring meaning back to Night Photography? Could I deliberately go out and just take pictures of the mundane things in the night and post them, or would I be too disappointed if I didn't find any magic? I like SF0 because it pushes my boundaries, so would I feel good about doing a task that didn't seem to do that for me? I would not.

But... what if I stretched the meaning of "neighborhood" a little?

Yes.

Downtown Chicago.



Downtown Chicago, everyone's neighborhood and also no one's. Millions of people come each weekday to work, each weekend to be tourists, but few spend the night. You can buy anything from expensive suits to cheap souvenirs, from the most gourmet and rare of cuisines to the most mundane McDonald's,



but you can't buy groceries, or make a drugstore run down the block at 2 AM. Its magnificent skyline, flanked by the Sears Tower and the Hancock Building, is known far and wide, and we own that when we are traveling. As a small child, visiting my grandparents in Michigan City, they would take me to the beach, and on clear days we could see those two tall buildings faintly visible across the lake, and I would nod in the dignified manner of a 5-year-old, thinking, "That is where I am from!"

Even the suburbanites claim it - "I'm from Chicago" even if they are from Schaumburg - and the non-Chicagoans of the world think of that skyline, of the Magnificent Mile, of Millennium Park, of the bustle and shopping on State Street,



of Marshall Fields-turned-Macy's, of the Art Institute of Chicago. It's the heart of our city, where billions of dollars pass through it each day, lining the pockets of our rich and throwing a little bit out here and there to prevent our CTA from falling down completely,



and never catch up on fixing all those potholes. We resent it, if we work there we might associate it only with work and not with play, we disdain it for its cheesy tourist attractions. Sometimes we go there ourselves and stare at the Bean and think it's really not so bad. Love it or hate it, it's as much my neighborhood as it is anyone else's.

But at night... the wide streets are nearly (though never entirely) empty of cars.



The huge halls of its financial institutions are empty (except for that one lonely night watchperson at the front desk, evenly spaced throughout with all the other night watchpeople - do they have some kind of network at least? Do they know each other or do they just sit at their desk alone all night?). The yellow glow of the streetlamps pervades everything, without the bright whiter glow of car headlights to cut it. The sidewalks, often deliberately constructed as part of the plazas of huge companies' headquarters, wide and landscaped, where millions of people push and shove on work days, are deserted.



Biking around downtown, taking pictures last night between the hours of 2 and 3 AM, there were several things that struck me:

-These buildings were all just so imposingly BIG without a surrounding buffer zone of teeming throngs of humanity.
-I could ride on either the street or sidewalk with very little thought as to which it was.
-I could completely disregard nearly all stoplights.
-I could, in fact, completely stop in the middle of the street for a while if that was a good place to take pictures.

There were a couple of streets with a bit more traffic even at that hour where I couldn't do this - namely, Clark Street and State Street - but for the most part it held true.

Below are the pictures of every Chicagoan's neighborhood, at a time when few ever see it.