Crawdaddy Shooting the Chicago Loop.

The Master of Blur catches me resting as an elevated train streaks by. A street photographer can feast just riding the trains and foraging the stations here. Charlie Hahn Photo.

The Loop, home of the Elevated Train, is a final shooting destination for the street photographer. I could probably ride for days just shooting commuters and the diverse neighborhoods adjacent to the many stations. However, the best days of shooting the Loop are probably past. Downtown Chicago is fast losing it fabulous funk to burgeoning gentrification. It is sadly whiter with lots of yuppies. The visual gold is moving away from the loop into some interesting neighborhoods. Just like in New York City Chinatown the very best images are in the past.

Fractured Fungus Covered Window Glass. Junked Freedom Bus. North Carolina Salvage Yard.

The bus is part of some jarring American history but it also unexpectedly coughed up some funky modern art. I learned to shoot these naturally occurring abstracts from my colleague Jim Provencher. The patterns, coloration, and presentation are very engaging. But the location of this fractured glazing real piqued my

The Forensic Forage Thrives on Finding Funk.

Just like pornography, you know it when you see it. You might just define it simply as being “off the wall” or as being “quirky odd“. I have been combining funk with the mundane in photo frames for decades. Confronted with shooting something spectacular like the Grand Canyon or the

Some Suspect Rock ‘n Roll Was Banned in Our House.

Don’t Worry Mom, She’s Italian! Timi Yuro missed a golden chance for her career to be really spectacular. She turned down legendary composer Burt Bacharach’s offer to record WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LOVE, in late 1962. She had already charted Number 1 a year earlier

I Found City Lights, Ferlinghetti, and a Young Man Named Jack.

I never made it to City Lights Book Store until the 2011honeymoon of my second marriage. The ethereal lure of San Francisco’s iconic North Beach was then powerful enough to finally coax me there. As I foraged the upstairs nooks, I felt the creative energy of those Beat geniuses

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Fractured Fungus Covered Window Glass. Junked Freedom Bus. North Carolina Salvage Yard.

The Forensic Forage Thrives on Finding Funk.

Some Suspect Rock ‘n Roll Was Banned in Our House.

I Found City Lights, Ferlinghetti, and a Young Man Named Jack.