John Wells doesn’t need to leave the city to get away from the noise and crowds. He just climbs the nearest railroad embankment, and is in a different world. The souvenirs he brings back are black-and-white photographs.
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But it looks like whoever abandoned the structures, ages ago, left the lights on. Wells loves to photograph by artificial light, adding flash to accentuate whatever man-made light illuminates scenes. Some of the most evocative views in his current exhibition at the Cultural Center were taken at night, lit by the glow of streetlights.
Wells has been fascinated by railroads ever since he moved to Chicago in the mid-1970s. “It seemed that everywhere I went there was a railroad or something that was served by a railroad. First, I wondered how important Chicago was to the railroad industry. Second, aesthetically, it’s real pleasant to look at: the massive steel, the engineered lines.”
At times the emptiness is haunting, as in the photographs of the Ashland Avenue Yards, formerly a major rail yard near the stockyards. In Wells’s photograph of a rail viaduct over an access road to the yards, the concrete abutments are massive, overgrown with brush, and dripping with white mineral deposits, as if they were parts of a cliff or cave. A dusting of snow covers the middle of the road and the sidewalks. And in the far lane of the road is only a streak of light–left by car headlights as Wells left open his shutter for a time exposure. Suddenly it seems the automobile age is transitory–just a specter–while the remnants of the railroads are as eternal as Stonehenge.
