Ryan Brown’s Photoblog

Yesterday I went downtown to shoot at Taste of Chicago, the big summer food festival in the park, but I ended up spending the evening waiting under tents or scaffolding for the rain to subside.  I covered my camera in a lens cloth and took it out in the drizzle for a few shots, but my shooting agenda was pretty much foiled by the elements.  It was an interesting scene, with people going about their eating in the rain and trying to have fun regardless of the soaking.  But the last thing I want to do is test my digital camera’s tolerance for wetness.  If there’s ever a perfect camera it will be waterproof.  Taste of Chicago goes on for another week…surely at least one of those days will be camera-friendly enough to attempt to make a masterpiece.

When I moved to New York in June 1999 the first gallery show I saw was of Ray K. Metzker’s City Stills, and it really influenced me.  It caused me to pay a lot of attention to light and shadow… maybe you won’t see much of that kind of work on this blog (as I’m currently shooting color digital instead of black and white film), but you can check out Metzker and then look at my early New York black and white work…

Anyway, I was at the Chicago Public Library last week and picked up City Stills for the first time in nearly ten years.  I knew a lot of the photos were from Chicago - I’ve been wanting for years to take street pictures in Chicago because of Metzker’s work - but now I recognize some of the exact locations from City Stills.  One such place is here, where today I got yet another face touching shot:

And I’m sad that I couldn’t find a link to the exact Metzker image the above photo corresponds to, but if any of you happen to have City Stills, get it out and flip through until you recognize this background.  I’ve been trying all week to get a picture on that spot…