After Dark
Along Lincoln Avenue on Chicago’s North Side, a dwindling collection of mid-century motels endures from a time when the street was a major route into and through the city. Once promoted as modern, convenient, and family-friendly, many of these properties have since acquired reputations for being seedy, outdated, or undesirable. Several have already disappeared, replaced by civic buildings, parks, and new development.
Photographed at night using long exposures, these images examine the remaining motels as both architectural artifacts and active, unknowable spaces. Their illuminated signs, exterior corridors, privacy walls, and empty courtyards evoke another era and, at times, another geography. They seem temporarily removed from contemporary Chicago, recalling roadside America, Southern California, or a fading vacation town.
I am drawn to the uneasy beauty of these aging properties and to the tension between their visible decline and their continued presence. The series preserves a portion of Chicago’s disappearing roadside landscape while acknowledging the mystery, melancholy, and hidden activity that gather around these buildings at night.
