Customer Reviews

The Calumet Region: An American Place

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Gary Cialdella's "cityscapes," almost all of which focus on factories, other industrial sites, or private houses, are quite provocatively unpeopled. This is not because Cialdella is a misogynist. He is, however, a photographer concerned with arranging objects in space as well as a poet telling us stories through visual images rather than words. Although most of these photographs do not include people, we are very aware of their presence. Like all photographers, Gary makes images partly to please himself and partly to draw viewers into his world.

As we look at these pictures of city scenes in northwest Indiana and northeast Illinois we share Gary's vision both of place and displacement. The people who are literally absent in these pictures are all the more present by implication because of the objects Gary has chosen to depict and because of what those objects suggest about the people who live and work in these spaces.

In some of these scenes all we see at first is the grim face of industry. There's also a haunting beauty in the desolation. Look, for instance, on page 86, at the abandoned blast furnace at Indiana, in East Chicago, Indiana, to see a starkly beautiful monument to the momentary triumph of technology. Although this blast furnace is abandoned, it still emanates power. I am reminded of Fritz Lang's expressionistic classic film, "Metropolis" - a similar ironic hymn to industry may be heard in Gary's scene if you listen hard enough. The desolation of many of these images is made all the more graphic by the way Gary contrasts his black and white tones. In some images pristine white oil tanks, the gleaming white facades of the houses, and the pure white plaster statues of Jesus or the Virgin Mary are sharply juxtaposed with dark, black, sometimes gleaming ebony factories, utility poles, and railroad tracks.

We can admire the arrangement of the shapes, textures, and tones of the industrial sites in these photographs in much the same way we admire similar industrial images in the paintings and photographs of Charles Sheeler. Sheeler and Cialdella both discover beauty in smokestacks, railroad cars, and steel mills. But what really makes this collection of images a series of interconnected portraits and a moving story is something like what informs the stories in Stuart Dybek's books, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed with Magellan: the people in those stories and the people implied in these photographs have created celebrations of life right in the middle of apparent blight and desolation.

Gary Cialdella's photographs of the Calumet Region are beautifully subtle and moving. This is photography at its best revealing universal truths from a personal perspective. The book's essays, design and sequencing strengthen and support the artist's vision of this fascinatingly complex social landscape. Fans of photography, American history and specifically the history of industrial America should take note of this extraordinary collection.

This book highlights the stark contrast between residential neighborhoods and heavy industry, which are often right next to each other. The quality of the photography is first rate and illustrates the uniqueness of the Calumet region.[ASIN:0252034562 The Calumet Region: An American Place]

Many photographs of the Whiting/Robertsdale Region.
Some of the images have changed over the years.
I noticed a few errors on photo locations.
All in all it is a blast to look through.