In “Borderlands,” a series of lush, almost surreal large-format images at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Eirik Johnson presents urban and near urban areas that have largely been abandoned to nature. Often one wonders about the story behind what’s shown. In Untitled (Sweater), an orange sweater and a brown shirt are tied together and stretched between trees. It turns out Johnson found them in a creek used by urban hobos, with the shirt covered in moss. Untitled (Debris) shows a bundle of sticks on the concrete ledge of a freeway underpass, apparently deposited there by a flood.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Johnson began photographing in his early teens, inspired by Ansel Adams and later by Edward Weston. He and a friend shared a darkroom in his native Seattle, and together they’d shoot everything from old billboards to wildflowers in a nearby mountain valley. Entering the University of Washington as a jazz studies major, then switching to history with a concentration on Latin America, Johnson took fewer photographs. But a year in Ecuador when he was a junior rekindled his interest in photography–and channeled it in a new direction. Everything in Ecuador, it seemed, carried traces of its history, which couldn’t be encompassed in the beautiful patterns of the formalist photography he loved. “There’s a huge indigenous population still speaking Quechua,” Johnson says. “And Inca ruins. I felt the past was so involved with the present.” Returning, he became more aware of Seattle’s history and started photographing freeway overpasses and downtown intersections, built on sites that had once been used by Native Americans for sweat lodges and funeral pyres. To produce stereo images–a format common 100 years ago–he made a camera with two pinholes. The resulting series served as his senior thesis for a double major in history and photography, and the university library bought prints for its collection.
While in Peru on the snow star trips, Johnson observed how the pilgrims marked their route by placing single stones on piles left by previous pilgrims. For Untitled (Tires), he consulted a tidal chart and waited days for the low tide that would reveal the abandoned tires he’d noticed on other occasions. Then, before taking the picture, he waded up to his knees in mud to place sticks with colored plastic on the tires as markers. Untitled (Tarp) shows the remains of a white tarp against an empty field, the plastic ripped to wispy shreds by the wind and rain, their shapes echoing those of the fennel plants in the background.
Info: 312-663-5554 or 312-344-7104
