Three days a week Thomas Marlow sets up his portable studio at the Silk Road Oasis in the Chicago Tourism Center and takes pictures of people. Hired by the city to capture visitors and Chicago residents alike, he sends his subjects home with a print of their choice, gratis. Each portrait takes about 15 minutes, as Marlow methodically gets a model release signed, takes anywhere from 5 to 30 shots, then displays them on his laptop and has the subject pick one. After eight weeks he figures he’s gotten some 300 portraits. He hopes to have 500 by the time the gig is over, at the end of September.
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Marlow, who’s 33, isn’t what you’d call an established photographer. A high school dropout, he got his GED but never went to college, hitchhiking around the country instead. He’s lived in Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, and Maryland (on a sailboat). In 2000 he moved to Chicago–the “best city,” he says, because it’s “like New York but with a hot dish feel.” Early in his career he was a “lumper,” a term first used for dock workers unloading ships, now applied to what Marlow did: unloading merchandise at warehouses. The lumping business didn’t promise much of a future, so Marlow started his own supply-chain-management firm, Logisteon, in 2003. He had one client, Global Berry Farms, and tracked its berries from the field–some 600 farmers were suppliers–to the warehouse. As part of quality control for Global he bought a camera to document the fruit. When his client’s Chicago branch shut down, he began taking pictures of flowers. That was in 2004. Since then he’s supported himself with odd jobs, some of them related to photography.
Marlow’s pictures from the Silk Road Oasis show a knack for portraiture. “I did what came to me,” he says. Less than two weeks after he started he got a candid, playful shot of cellist Yo-Yo Ma snarling at the camera and curling his fingers into what look like dragon’s claws. Marlow also enticed Lois Weisberg, the commissioner of Cultural Affairs, into making a very strange, unofficial-looking face (he’s sure that photo is making the rounds among city workers). He asks for silly faces a lot, not because he’ll use them but because making them usually loosens people up. Or he suggests his subjects pretend they’re looking at someone they love. He asked one four-year-old, who reminded him of Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes, to start screaming and jumping up and down. The kid was happy to oblige, though his mother wasn’t too pleased, and Marlow got him off the ground with his mouth wide open. He’s also caught a salesman in a suit and tie poking his tongue out impishly, another middle-aged guy giving his “pimp look,” and a young man smiling and pointing at the dimple in his cheek (he’d told Marlow, “This is what gets the ladies”).
Marlow’s experience as a salesman may help when it comes to making calls and cutting through red tape. He adds that as a supply-chain manager his job was “planning, planning, planning.” Yet he says of this project, “I don’t expect it to take me anywhere. I love thinking about the possibilities, about someone walking into the station and being overwhelmed by this wall of portraits. I’m looking to capture people as they truly are, without the barriers, without the fear that so many of us carry around.”
