The scene
Tuesday, September 21, 3:30pm.
THE BIG PICTURE The yellow moving truck that’s actually a photo studio is parked illegally on South LaSalle Street in the Financial District. “The permit’s in my back pocket,” Sara Collins (pictured) says with a wink and a smile, ushering passersby into the back of the vehicle to have their photos taken for a citywide portrait project called I Am Chicago (iamchicago.org). “The meter maid came by,” Collins says. “She bitched about her job, and then we took her photo. Another thread in the fabric of the city!” Fueled in part by a $7,000 Richard H. Driehaus Foundation grant, 23-year-old Collins and her boyfriend, Adam Novak, 27—both Chicago natives and Art Institute grads—have snapped full-body shots of more than 3,000 city dwellers at 30 corners around town. (They’ve applied to display the photos at the Cultural Center and plan to release a book some time next year.) “We just did 26th and California, by the Cook County Criminal Courthouse,” Novak says. “Everyone thought we were taking mug shots! We had to explain that we weren’t the Man.”
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