Workshop Arts
We distribute books to underserved communities—
We work to address the inequalities in ownership of art books by providing a limited number of books, free of charge, to communities that lack access to and ownership of art books.
We plant trees—
We believe forests are crucial to our earth and as a sanctuary for animals, which we help maintain for future generations by planting trees for every book we publish.
Shortlisted Communication Arts Design Award
“I felt like I was circling around someone else’s wondrous, magical dream, viewing from the outside a series of well-shaped, interlocking private worlds where intruders are neither welcomed nor barred.”
—Allen Wheatcroft, Björkevägen (Birch Road)
"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
Allen Wheatcroft's images have been about the study of people through a street photography aesthetic and orientation. In this new body of work presented as companion books, The Northside and Björkevägen (Birch Road), Wheatcroft is still exploring people and their influences and idiosyncrasies, but now through a study of place and environment.
In his new work, the photographer turns his attention to structures and spaces in two settings, the city of Chicago and rural Sweden, and how these places are shaped by human presence, relations, and impact. The work also defines "home"; conflicting emotions about home fill Wheatcroft’s photographs of Chicago and Sweden. About the dual project, the photographer says that he is "drawn to barriers and feelings of separation and loneliness fostered by how we shape our landscapes."
In his seminal book on photography, Ways of Seeing, art critic and writer John Berger noted, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”
This view speaks to the images in The Northside and, more broadly, to Wheatcroft's outlook on his recent work. By documenting both the north of Chicago, and the Swedish countryside in a related effort, and presenting the books as two nested parts of a single project, Wheatcroft invites the viewer to reflect on the relationship between two distant geographic spaces as well as their shared humanistic aspects.
