I Am Chicago is a documentary photography and video project by Adam Novak and Sara Collins. It consists of full body portraits and video footage of pedestrians in thirty neighborhoods across

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

, spanning the years of 2009–2011. It became a gallery of photographs and a website, showing the tremendous richness of the way that Chicagoans present themselves to the public. The gallery shows the faces, bodies, attitudes, clothes, accessories and tools of everyday life that people lug with them, morphing wildly from North to South, and East to West of Chicago. The photographers used a rental moving truck as a portrait studio, utilizing natural light from the translucent roof of the truck. Each neighborhood of Chicago is represented through a careful selection of portraits of its citizens as they passed the street corner studio in the course of a single day. To entice Chicagoans to pose, a professional studio portrait was printed on the spot and given to each participant for free. The project attracted the attention of the ''

Chicago Reader The ''Chicago Reader'', or ''Reader'' (stylized as ЯEADER), is an American alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a ...

'' in early 2011, when

NBC 5 Chicago WMAQ-TV (channel 5) is a television station in Chicago, Illinois, United States, airing programming from the NBC network. It is owned and operated by the network's NBC Owned Television Stations division alongside Telemundo outlet WSNS-TV (cha ...

used the words "We Are Chicago" for their advertising campaign.

Miner, Michael. , ''Chicago Reader''
, January 27, 2011, accessed March 23, 2011.

Notes

External links

Photography exhibitions Documentary films about Chicago {{arts-documentary-film-stub