2024 06 11
Spring blossoms. Chicago, Illinois. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
Here’s a silly little memory that popped into my head:
One day a number of years ago, I was working on a project for a nonprofit which I was really excited about. The client had asked me, in addition to a half dozen other Chicago photographers, all of which I respected, to capture the city over the course of a summer. Each of us was assigned a few neighborhoods which we could document more or less as we pleased. It was a self assignment which I turned into a competition. I was motivated to make the best work I could to stand out among a distinguished crowd.
The silly moment was this: having been assigned Humboldt Park, my own neighborhood, I made a weekend out of the annual Puerto Rican pride celebrations which were happening all around my house. Setting out to document the parade one day, I stopped off at a recently-opened park along The 606 trail to photograph it. Hunting for some unique angle among the large kid’s netting, I was focused on my compositions when an angry mom snapped at me for taking photos of her children innocently playing on the play set.
“Oh no, ma’am, I’m an important documentary photographer capturing Chicago’s neighborhoods for a big important project.” I said to myself, while mustering up something hopefully less self-important to her. In an effort to assure her I was, indeed, on the up and up, I offered to show her the images on the back of my camera, to give her a sense of what I was out documenting. Luckily for me, she took my word for it, because when I myself glanced down at the screen, the image staring up at me was of small children on the little roller coaster ride which was set up in the park at the carnival, which I had just made at the end of the previous day on my walk home. Had she seen this image, which seemed impossible to explain away, there’s no telling what might’ve happened.
As is often the case in any photographer’s career-path-to-cynic, this project largely stalled and never became the big and important work I had imagined it was going to become the day I photographed children playing in the park. At least I had a nice laugh to myself about how absurd that entire situation was, which likely only a weirdo photographer like myself can fully appreciate.
-Clayton
