The Northside

Allen Wheatcroft
The Northside

Photographs: Allen Wheatcroft

Publisher: Workshop Arts

112 pages

Year: 2024

ISBN: 978-1-959684-04-6

Price: 30 €

Comments: Hardcover, 24,5 x 17 cm, color photographs. 112 pages and two foldouts. First edition. Design: Caleb Cain Marcus (Luminosity Lab).

"The Northside doesn’t touch on the iconic Chicago downtown, the city’s famous neighborhoods, or urban issues reported in the media. I kept to ordinary, street-side landmarks. This generic middle-American city, where I live."
—Allen Wheatcroft, The Northside

The images in The Northside were taken on Chicago’s Northside, and beyond, in an attempt to find, or create "order" through the photographs. Wheatcroft says he was fascinated by "... the order that emerges from daily life in ordinary living areas, the order to be found in the tumble of sheds and storefronts, houses, repair shops, fences and alleyways, intersections and parking lots that spill out across the plain that extends to the north of Chicago, in the chaotic suburban-industrial-commercial sprawl of the city’s northside."

The resulting photographs utilize color and composition to inform the narrative aspect of the objects, architecture, and landscape elements present. The viewer is symbolically walking alongside Wheatcroft as he scrounges through the city’s jumble, observing, watching, and blurring the lines between the literal and suggestive.

Allen Wheatcroft has a background in social sciences, had a long career in publishing, and raced sports cars for years.

(From the publisher)