6 hours in Chicago
An Unplanned Layover, A Camera, and a Promise to My Son
My flight from Florida to London, connecting through Chicago, was delayed long enough that the airline put me up overnight instead. That left me six hours of daylight to explore a city I hadn't planned on seeing, camera in hand.
The Promise
First, a video call home. I watched my four-year-old's face fall when I told him mommy wasn't going to be back when she said she would be. So I made a promise. With a dino-obsessed 4 year old, what other promise could I offer but to send home photos of the fossils at the Field Museum? It was soon forgotten that mommy wasn't home yet.
Sue the T-Rex was non-negotiable. You don't promise a four-year-old dinosaurs and skip the largest, most complete T-Rex skeleton in the world and I had to take a photo of my favorite. The parasaurolophus - the big duck-billed one with a crest on it's head. I also talked a couple of strangers into taking my photo underneath a life-size Quetzalcoatlus — genuinely intimidating to stand under, wingspan like a small aircraft.
The Bean, and the Problem With Crowds
From the museum I walked to Cloud Gate or The Bean, to everyone who isn't being formal about it and wishes to annoy Anish Kapoor. It was packed, everyone angling for the same reflection shot. I worked the edges and settled into the reflections of Chicago's skyscrapers. The Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a short walk on, gave me something I wasn't expecting — light bouncing off Frank Gehry's steel ribbons, turning the metal into texture rather than surface. The kind of detail you only notice when you've got nowhere else to be.
A Quick Nod to Ferris Bueller
I couldn't be in Chicago and skip the Art Institute — partly as a photographer, partly because Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a classic film. It was a walk-through rather than the visit it deserved, but I turned a corner and stopped dead in front of a room of Cindy Sherman photographs. Completely unplanned. Took me straight back to studying her work at college.
Route 66
I hadn't known Route 66 ends in Chicago, a few blocks from my hotel. I ended the day there with a proper Chicago hot dog, more or less where the whole road begins.
I didn't plan this day. No shot list, no scouting, no editing schedule waiting for me after. I shot on my phone and my camera, whichever was closer to hand, and answered to no one but myself about what was worth pointing a lens at. A refreshing day of photography — no client, no brief, nobody to please but me. Back in the UK, a four-year-old got his dinosaur photos.
