Ron Gordon’s black-and-white photos of local cityscapes, endangered buildings, and demolition sites have their roots in a childhood spent playing in the street and building forts in vacant lots. Growing up on the far south side in the 1940s and ’50s, Gordon rarely traveled, even to the Loop. (“I thought of 91st and Commercial as downtown,” he says.) While he was still in high school, his brother began studying architecture at IIT–and for the first time Gordon heard someone talking passionately about his career rather than about cars, girls, or sports. Soon after enrolling at the University of Illinois Navy Pier campus, Gordon read Crime and Punishment. “I stayed up all night. I couldn’t believe how incredible it was–the mystery, the style, the ideas, the self-evaluation.” Later, after he’d switched to Urbana-Champaign, he was inspired to major in French by stories of Paris in the 1920s, which seemed “about as far away as you could get from south Chicago.” After a year in Europe he returned to Urbana-Champaign for grad school, where he met his first wife. Her brother was a commercial photographer in Chicago, and on visits Gordon hung around his studio. “He gave me a Pentax he didn’t need and taught me to print, and I worked for him sometimes.”
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Though Gordon has used a view camera for most of his career, he shot the photos in this show with a 35-millimeter panoramic camera, which allows him to photograph while walking. The three stacked images in Utility Pole, Roosevelt Road reveal a dense cluster of poles. Gordon’s thought was that not many people see utility poles up close, but from the bridge over the river you get a good view. “I photograph things people see every day but don’t really look at, kind of to say, Stop, take a breath.”
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