Maggie Daley Park
Set between Lake Michigan and Chicago’s dense downtown skyline, Maggie Daley Park feels like a small oasis carved out of the city. Curving paths, formal plantings, trellises, sculpture, and long views toward the surrounding towers create a constant dialogue between landscape and architecture. In black and white, those relationships become even more pronounced, as trees, shadows, steel, stone, and glass are reduced to shape, rhythm, and contrast.
The series moves between the quiet geometry of the park itself and the vertical city rising around it, allowing each to frame the other. I also included the historic Chicago Stock Exchange entrance arch on the nearby grounds of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although technically outside the park, it sits only steps away and felt too beautiful and too visually connected to the surrounding landscape and architecture to leave out.
Together, the photographs capture what I find most appealing about this small corner of Chicago: a place of unexpected calm, beauty, and order surrounded by the movement, action, and noise of the bustling city.
