Björkevägen (Birch Road) and The Northside

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.

Björkevägen (Birch Road)

While Wheatcroft has lived for 15 years on Chicago’s northside in the city’s historic Swedish neighborhood, during the pandemic he began spending summers in rural Sweden, in a small village along the Baltic Sea in eastern Sörmland. The colors bloom throughout the images he made there, and the tranquil and peaceful character he finds in the place is made apparent through the human-made structures and natural world he photographed. 

Wheatcroft says, "The images in Björkevägen reflect a tension I feel in the real and imagined space between belonging and being an outsider, between trying to enter a place and finding it, or myself, recalcitrant, seeing a world apart even as I approach it."

The Northside

The images in The Northside were taken on Chicago’s Northside, and beyond, in an attempt to find, or create "order" through the photographs. Wheatcroft says he was fascinated by "... the order that emerges from daily life in ordinary living areas, the order to be found in the tumble of sheds and storefronts, houses, repair shops, fences and alleyways, intersections and parking lots that spill out across the plain that extends to the north of Chicago, in the chaotic suburban-industrial-commercial sprawl of the city’s northside."

The resulting photographs utilize color and composition to inform the narrative aspect of the objects, architecture, and landscape elements present. The viewer is symbolically walking alongside Wheatcroft as he scrounges through the city’s jumble, observing, watching, and blurring the lines between the literal and suggestive.

Allen Wheatcroft has a background in social sciences, had a long career in publishing, and raced sports cars for years.

Press:
The Photoblographer
Eye of Photography 

Author: Allen Wheatcroft
Design: Caleb Cain Marcus, Luminosity Lab

Björkevägen, Birch Road
ISBN: 978-1-959684-05-3
Dimensions: 6.54 x 9.6 inches
Number of pages: 112 
Binding: Swiss hardcover  

The Northside
ISBN:978-1-959684-04-6
Dimensions: 6.54 x 9.6 inches
Number of pages: 112 and 2 foldouts 
Binding: Swiss hardcover  

Limited Edition Prints
11x14 Archival Pigment Prints
Edition of 10