Workshop Arts

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.

Shortlisted Rencontre d’Arles Book Awards

Shortlisted Communication Arts Design Award



“The experience of making this work has granted catharsis, self-forgiveness, awareness, and ultimately the seeds of a fledgling confidence as a mother, female, and artist. It is my hope that it can help others with the same.”

—Elizabeth Clark Libert



Boy Crazy, is an invitation to walk alongside a piece of Elizabeth's journey as she examines the effects of past traumas. Our experiences and subsequent memories don’t disappear; they all combine to create our story. Perspectives may shift over time, layers of life may contribute to different contexts, but the events themselves can’t be undone. With trauma, these pieces of our story can get stuck, and, as a result, our mental health can be challenged.



The book consists of three parts, the middle contains color photographs of Elizabeth's two young sons interacting with daily life, independently and together, against the backdrop of an Eden-like landscape. The first and third parts of the book are textual along with self-portraits and include conversations between Libert and her sons, excerpts from communication between herself and her perpetrator, discussions and discoveries with her mother, and her own introspective narrative of then, now, and in between.

Cyan Magenta is Caleb Cain Marcus’ exploration of color inspired by the changing size and color of the sun and moon. With each page turn a disc of color grows in size and density until the page is covered, this repeats with the second color until cyan and magenta create blue. The sequence then moves in reverse and the disc diminishes in color and size until only the white page remains. The book can be viewed in either direction referencing the changing of night into day and day into night.

The upper Ohio River Valley has a long history of people making things from its dirt. With a low iron content and great plasticity, the clay of the region has been mined and fired to make everything from bricks to colorful fiestaware. At the beginning of the twentieth century, so much pottery came out of the region that it was touted as the “pottery capital of the world.” Yet that boosterism told only part of the story. As with many towns in what is now America’s Rust Belt, the glory days of manufacturing were never quite as robust as they are remembered to be. And here, where industry intersects with Appalachian culture, the veins of history can be particularly difficult to isolate.

Walker's Vein combines color photographs of this region with brief texts that describe a single historical narrative from multiple perspectives.