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"CHICAGO AND THE DIANA: TOY CAMERA IMAGES BY DAN ZAMUDIO" Chicago Cultural Center Chicago Gallery News" January 2011 Chicago Maroon January 10, 2011 Photography Exhibition A review by Hugh Iglarsh March 2006 Dan Zamudio has participated in each of the three Algren exhibits. He uses his vintage Diana camera, with its plastic lens and uncertain focus, in a Proustian quest to capture the feel of a swiftly receding past. As Algren wrote nostalgic elegies to the tight-knit urban village of his youth, so Zamudio presents visually the artifacts of an older communal order, lingering here and there between dollar stores and Wal-Marts. “Neon signs are disappearing quickly,” he says, victims of Midwestern winters and the winds of fashion. He has collected some of what is left. The overlapping words written in light against the darkness of the Chicago night are like frames from a classic film noir. The pictures are jazzy evocations of a pre-television age, when every neighborhood had its little Broadway and Chicago after dusk was indeed a neon wilderness. "CHICAGO IN BLACK AND WHITE" Photography Exhibition A review by Hugh Iglarsh March 2005 To use a toy “Diana” camera, with it’s cloudy plastic lens and guesswork viewfinder, is to gamble with light and space-creating a certain parallel between photographer Dan Zamudio and Nelson Algren. But Zamudio wins more often at the developing tray than did Algren at the poker table. Influenced directly by Algren’s writings and also by Art Shay’s photo essays, Zamudio creates small-scale monuments to a disappearing city: Algren’s “neon wilderness” of dark streets and alleys punctuated by glowing, blinking appeals to drown one’s sorrow inside. Several shots are of landmarks that graced their neighborhood for generations, such as the gigantic “THIRSTY?” sign that flashed its message of liquid relief in Jefferson Park for more than 70 years, until torn down last fall at the prompting of an uptight city that wants it’s signs flat and it’s vices discreet. And there’s DeMar’s coffee shop on Chicago Avenue, which is still there, holding out in a neighborhhod that’s trending yuppie. “I know it’s going to be gone soon”, says Zamudio of his efforts to document this modest landmark. “Back porches are disappearing, too- and whole blocks of frame houses are just being wiped out for new buildings that have no character.” West division Street in the 1950’s was known as “Polish Broadway.” Then the neon had an appealing brashness, like a shiny plaid suit. In today’s postmodern city, the old flash is cultivated as a nostalgia trip for hipsters seeking to escape the colorless, shadowless space of the strip mall and parking lot. Zamudio’s city is gray and its elements lack sharp definition. His photos are less about the things themselves than the threatened urban ecosystem they occupy. The old industrial city depicted here was no Shangi-La, but it had what the photographer refers to as a “lived-in” quality, in contrast to the oddly grim affluence of Wicker Park’s new loft and condo complexes. There are stories within these intimate photos- stories and characters and memories. They’re meant to be “reminiscent of your grandparents’ photo album,” says Zamudio. Their bittersweet tone, seasoned with on offhand humor, deserves the adjective Algrenesque. "ALGREN'S EYE" Photography Exhibition March 2004 by Hugh Iglarsh and Warren Leming Dan Zamudio's photos are tiny windows into a disappearing present, the once-ubiquitous Chicago of grimy corner diners and faded boarding houses. It is the fraying working-class fabric of a gentrifying city. Shot over the past year and a half, these black and white photos seem infinitely older, casting the soft focus of nostalgia over an environment slipping away before our eyes. The rusting vintage automobiles caught by his dime store "Diana" camera with its cloudy lens could be stuffed bison shabbily commemorating an ancient vanished prairie. "All that's solid melts into air," wrote Marx about capitalism's dance of creative destruction. Here we see the process in action, the great meltdown of place and history into the blankness of so-called "real" estate. "The character of the city is going," says Zamudio. "I have to save what I like." The imperfection of his plastic camera makes it perfect for his warts-and-all mission. "What you see and what the camera sees can be totally different," he says."You just let go of control." It's at these moments of Zen-like relinquishment that the present moment wavers and the city tells its own story. |