The Calumet:  An American Place

I grew up in the Calumet Region near its western edge, in Blue Island, Illinois. Our home was on the north side of town one block from the City of Chicago. It was a neighborhood of working and middle class families. If we thought of ourselves as belonging to a region it was Chicago. The city was next door, and we benefited from its proximity. Both of my parents made the daily thirteen-mile commute to work by train to the Chicago Loop. As a child I played in the streets and alleys of well-kept neighborhoods of modest homes and apartment buildings. These neighborhoods are like islands, in this case surrounded by industry, railroads and waterways. Blue Island had them all; the Cal Sag Channel that cut just south of the business district; the Clark Oil Refinery, adjacent to my high school, and railroads that stopped traffic in every direction you traveled. When we were kids it was not unusual to ride our bikes past a drop forge one day or to the Little Calumet River the next. Neighborhood, industry and open space co-mingled and we thought nothing of it.

In 1979 I made my first photographs in Calumet. That was a day trip, which I drove from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where I lived and taught photography. At the time, my photographs were almost exclusively of open landscapes. Photographing the industrial landscape of East Chicago and Whiting at that time was a change of pace for me. My efforts from that day lingered in the back of my mind for a quite a while. These efforts moved to the forefront in 1986 when I began the work for this series. The location where I started was Whiting, Indiana, the “Little City on the Lake”, and the home of the Standard Oil Refinery. An explosion at the refinery in 1955 is a vivid childhood memory. From our home we could see the mushroom-shaped cloud in the blue sky to the east. The day after the explosion I saw newspaper photographs of the disaster that showed twisted and melted steel and the rubble where homes once stood. Years later, the first photographs I made in Whiting were of homes bordering the then Amoco Refinery.

Over the years that I traveled back and forth from my Michigan home to photograph Calumet I became increasingly aware of how the photographs had connections to my own experiences and memories. As teenagers we drove our parents’ cars on these streets. The sights and sounds of my youth were like background music: the tempo of steel mills and railroad horns melding with the rock’n roll music coming from the car radio. As an adult, driving and photographing in Calumet, I traveled some of these same streets (jazz and blues on the car stereo) in search of photographs. As a photographer one of my concerns is to evoke a sense of place. Certain locales possess a pronounced sense of place. For me the Calumet is that kind of place. I haven’t lived in there since college, but growing up in the region I made an emotional connection that to this day influences the subjects of my photographs.

My photographs of Calumet address the subtlety and dramatic contrasts in this complex landscape. I recognize the tension between industry and neighborhoods, the environmental damage a photograph cannot see and the displacement of families as industries failed. However, a landscape as intricate as Calumet is not easy to define: it is a sprawling place, made of many towns and cites covering portions of two states. My way of “seeing” this region is with a generous eye, open to its details and subtleties. My attention has been to the older industrial areas that follow the contour of Lake Michigan. The newer communities to the south, while a part of the region, are distanced from industry and the Lake, which for me is the heart of the Calumet region.

These photographs point to a specific time and place, but the details revealed lead inevitably to a larger picture, the sweep of history, as it were, not simply in the twenty years I worked on this series, but back to the time of three shifts a day at the mills, up to a time today of empty acres where mills once stood, and beyond our sense of time in the vastness of Lake Michigan, which gives one pause to think, and to imagine the forces of geology that shaped this region. Today, Calumet remains an industrial place, adapted to a post-industrial society, and competing in a global market with mills owned by foreign investors, as well as Amoco Oil now BP, (British Petroleum).

This region is a working place, and work is still done there, but in the dynamic of the new economy it has adapted and changed. The people who arrived in early 20th Century were mostly from eastern and southern Europe, adding to a population of German, Irish and Scots, and African-Americans. When industry was thriving they lived in neighborhoods next to the mills. During the 1980’s and 1990’s the once powerful industries began closing, leaving behind empty land and troubled neighborhoods. More recently, Mexican immigrants have reclaimed many of these old neighborhoods, resurrecting them into viable communities. A lot of the work they do has changed, and wages are lower, but like the previous immigrants they see a better life ahead, and have staked their futures on it.

Industry remains in Calumet, but is also common to see pleasure boats share the waterways with the Great Lakes ships entering or leaving Lake Michigan through the Calumet Channel. Three casinos are part of the revenue stream of three cities: Hammond, East Chicago, and Gary, Indiana. The site of them amidst the old industry is telling, yet they are small things compared to a steel mill or the Lake. Thinking about this region, I believe its defining characteristic is the contrast of Lake Michigan and the industry anchored to its shores. It is ironic that the shores where the mills sit is made up of landfill pushed into the lake, and thus altering the natural shoreline, much as the city of Chicago did after the great fire, but put there to make Grant Park. There is the beauty of the lake and the grittiness of industry side by side, nature and human activity in a tenuous dance of co-existence. For the millions of people who live and work in the region the lake is a place of escape, of recreation and relaxation - a counterweight to the workday world. After hours of photographing I would often drive to the lake, either for a break in the middle of a long day, or when the sun was going down. The lake can be a calm soothing place, a pleasing escape from traffic. While many, including myself, have left to live elsewhere, many have remained. Besides those who have stayed, new immigrants, mostly of Hispanic descent, have made their homes in the old neighborhoods near industry and Lake Michigan. The presence of Lake Michigan in the daily lives of the residents is difficult to measure, but I find it difficult to imagine it is not an important ingredient in making this place home.