On a walk one afternoon in 1981 in his new neighborhood near the Dan Ryan, photographer Jay Wolke noticed “this very strange looking homemade yellow kayak lying on an old gravel road,” he says. The river was several hundred yards away. “There was overgrown grass and a factory building, all on the underside of this monstrous expressway bridge.” Wolke saw this East Pilsen scene as a microcosm of the city, juxtaposing “anachronistic human handcrafted stuff and above it this monumental contemporary structure with life speeding along. I saw a combination of the personal and monumental, the above and below, the old and the new.” For the next four years he took thousands of pictures of the Dan Ryan from various vantage points, sometimes from a moving car. A 1985 exhibit of these images at the Chicago Historical Society helped launch his professional career, but he hadn’t looked at them in years when photographer Bob Thall, who like Wolke teaches at Columbia College, expressed interest in a book. Sixty were published in Along the Divide, and there are 38 on view at City, including Yellow Kayak.
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Jay Wolke: Along the Divide
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jon Randolph.
