Nearly every week for the past 10 years, Paul D’Amato has been photographing the environs of Midway International Airport. The second-busiest hub in the region, it is tightly hemmed in by the neighborhoods of Garfield Ridge and Clearing on Chicago’s southwest side. Those who fly in and out of there don’t much stick around to take in the strip mall boulevards, rows of proud bungalows, smoke-belching industries, and the folks who live and work with planes roaring overhead every few minutes. D’Amato did, with an unwieldy large-format camera in hand. The results astound.
Meticulously hung in the galleries on the second floor of the Chicago Cultural Center is “Midway: Paul D’Amato.” Could there be a more perfect place to have mounted this exhibition of 48 large and midsize prints, 65 small workprints and one video? The grandest civic building in the city, right downtown, provides centrality to a subject that has only ever been midway to somewhere else. Actually, the name of the airport derives from the major naval battle of World War II, but it aptly describes the climate of a people and a place halfway between urban and suburban, local and exotic, rich and poor, here and there. Midway is midway.
An old-school documentarian with the heart of a Renaissance portraitist, D’Amato divides his time between reverent pictures of individuals and masterfully composed neighborhood scenes. Many of his images are both. “Judy with Lawnmower” presents a middle-aged woman, weathered, svelte and tough as they come, tending the grass outside the airport walls. A plane flying by grazes her crown, a stop sign looms. It is as if she wields enough force to halt the jet, the viewer, the world. The seasoned waitress in “Hortencia & Leonardo,” raked with golden light, set against the quilted stainless-steel wall of the diner where she works, her red fingernails gently placed on the chairback of a young child, is a shoo-in for the Madonna of Midway.
There are plenty of young people here, too, including seraphic “Jewel,” panhandling with a pit bull and partner from a weedy highway median; “Aya,” coolly posed in a pink hijab that complements her work apron; two teen girls dressed up for a quinceañera, one all in white, the other in black, standing arm in arm in a field of electricity pylons. Is everyone in Midway female and attractive? Certainly, the men tend not to come off quite as well as the women. There is “Terry,” exhausted enough to keel over; a defeated fellow resting on the edge of a pump, an AIR sign ridiculous above his head; an older guy in a Popeye’s shirt and plastic apron taking out the trash as if he were Atlas bearing the weight of the world. The long-haired dude seen through the filthy glass door of a dive bar called Duffy’s Place could almost be Jesus, but Jesus on a very bad day at the end of a very bad week.
Even those men treated with obvious regard inhabit compositions that unsettle the gravitas that might have been theirs: “Reese,” a used car salesman in tie and trousers, stands in the entryway of his dealership, situated almost absurdly at the vanishing point of a dozen perspectival lines drawn from door edges and decals. The photograph of “Bob,” a grizzled man working the front desk of the Midway Motel, is less a portrait than a palimpsest, shot through security glass pasted with handwritten notices and layered with endless reflections.
D’Amato is not above humor, some of it weird. A person in a hot pink gorilla suit stands forlorn in the parking lot of a boarded-up store. A young woman rides a bright red mechanical bull at a block party, eyes closed in blissful concentration. A man named Larry sits angrily on a folding chair outside his house, desperately watering a dead patch of grass amid all the well-tended gardens of his neighbors. There’s even a professional photography studio interior, full of potted plants and framed versions of exactly the kind of images D’Amato is not interested in making.
The places of Midway that appear as a backdrop in D’Amato’s portraits take center stage in others. Tidy bungalows and low-rise mid-century apartment buildings line blocks that seem to go on forever but are sorely lacking trees. Factories sit alarmingly close to houses. Airplanes are a constant, as are utility lines and poles. D’Amato times and angles these facts so that their compressed geometry becomes strange and revelatory. Everything lines up in one decisive moment: a kid jumps on a backyard trampoline, straight up at a plane, right through an impossible tangle of wires; two ranch homes sit side-by-side, a massive trio of electrical towers rising between them; an industrial shed mimics the house that fronts it, from roofline to chimney to the smoke that billows from the former and the water that sprays from the latter’s lawn sprinkler.
D’Amato has not followed the most recent turn in documentary photography, where capacious amounts of text, in the form of hard research and interviews, are exhibited alongside images. LaToya Ruby Frazier is perhaps the most celebrated of these artists. That’s OK, sometimes a picture alone — or even more so, in series — does the trick, especially the kind of openminded, observant, gorgeous photos that D’Amato is able to make by returning again and again to a place about which he has become curious, then dedicated. We should all be so lucky to have him as a stranger among us, camera at the ready.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
“Midway: Paul D’Amato” runs through Jan. 4, 2025, at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., 312-744-5000, chicago.gov
