Alleys & Ruins no. 134, Dub Stop (2010, Chicago, IL, 11pm)
Alleys & Ruins no. 134, Dub Stop (2010, Chicago, IL, 11pm)
A short behind-the-scenes video is available here.
Sometimes a scene stirs in me the ethereal feeling of a childhood dream, a fleeting sense that everything is cloaked in the supernatural and that the place before me belongs in some strange fantasy. That's when I know I'm onto something and I put my tripod down.
Then the adult part of me takes over, trying to translate that feeling into a theatrical image and make it easier for the viewer to step into the space.
The paradox is that the places that trigger this feeling in me are often bleak examples of urban decay, places most people would avoid. I've always loved them.
The photographs become a tug of war between those extremes: beauty and ugliness, joy and sadness, light and darkness, optimism and pessimism, life and death.
FROM THE BOOK
I’m out with my friend, a filmmaker and music video editor, when we find this spot. The stop sign has “dub” scrawled above it, Dub Stop, a perfect title, a wordplay on “dubstep,” the music genre. I show it to him, and while I start planning my lights he begins telling me a story. Normally I tune out everything when I’m shooting, but what he says is too insane to ignore.
He used to edit rap videos for Chicago’s music scene. For two years he lived in that world, until one night he almost didn’t make it out. A director brought him a project that was way overdue – he was hired to finish the cut in one night. By morning the producer stormed in with two men. When he said it wasn’t ready, the producer went ballistic. He yanked a gun and pressed it to the director’s temple. Then he turned it on him.
“You better explain why this video still ain’t done.”
He tells me how he froze, certain this was it. The director had burned through the money and lied, and now he was implicated. He talked his way out, barely. The producer put the gun down, he finished the edit, and he walked away from that world for good.
As he tells me this, I’m moving through the underpass, painting the rusted beams and scarred columns with light. I’m half listening, half working, but Dub Stop turns out to be one of my strongest photographs.
Maybe his close call seeps into the picture, or maybe it doesn’t. The danger and ugliness is all there, I just made it pretty.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
A 32 × 40-inch framed print of Dub Stop was acquired by the Illinois State Museum for its permanent collection in 2014.
The photograph was also featured in a Chicago Tribune arts “Pick of the Week” exhibition at the Illinois State Museum, where an 8 × 10-foot print was installed.
For the 20th anniversary of Alleys & Ruins, the Chicago Arts District displayed an 8 × 10-foot print of Dub Stop in its street-level ShowPODs for four months, the longest it had kept an exhibition on view.
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