Chicago: loop/chicago: lake
Photographs by Michael A. Smith & Paula Chamlee
104 pages, 8.5"x16.75"
Hardcover Edition: $95
Special Collectors Limited Edition: Starting at $2000

About the book

Chicago: Loop/Chicago: Lake by Michael A. Smith and Paula Chamlee is two books in one. Begin on one side for Chicago: Loop. Flip the book over and begin with Chicago: Lake.

The Offer:  Chicago: Loop/Chicago: Lake is published in an edition of only 1,100 signed and numbered copies. The first 100 copies will come with the purchaser’s choice of any photograph in the book at a price half of what a print alone sells for. No more than 10 original photographs of any image will be available. Make your selection early. A pre-publication offer is also available for the hardcover edition.

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Purchase Collectors Limited Edition book with photograph(s) 

CHICAGO: LOOP
by Michael A. Smith
48 pages hardbound 8.5"x16.75"
41 reproductions from 8”x20” contact prints

CHICAGO: LAKE
by Paula Chamlee
56 pages hardbound 8.5"x16.75"
28 diptychs, triptychs, and quartets reproductions of photographs, drawings, assemblages ephemeral constructions, and writing

For the first 50 copies:
$3,000 with your choice of any Michael A. Smith photograph in the book
$2,000 with your choice of any Paula Chamlee photograph in the book
and for the combinations by Chamlee:
$3,000 for the diptychs
$4,500 for the triptychs
$6,000 for the quartets
The photographs of the curvilinear branches and the drawings of same (done on location) are available individually for $2,500.

Shipping is $35 for a single print and the book, $45 for the diptychs, triptychs or quartets. All silver prints are archivally processed, mounted and overmatted.

You may select your photograph(s) now or you may make your selection after you receive the book.

The signed and numbered book without an original photograph is $95.

Don’t miss out on Chicago: Loop/Chicago: Lake. It is sure to become a valuable collector’s item.

Chicago: Loop/Chicago: Lake
Known worldwide as “the city that works,” Chicago has the architecture to back up its reputation: muscular office buildings, soaring skyscrapers, and bridges and train tracks that shuttle workers to and from the Loop. Yet Chicago’s residents play just as hard as they work—and when weather permits, they can be found playing on their city’s glorious twenty-six-mile stretch of lakefront.
In their combined book, husband-and-wife team Paula Chamlee and Michael A. Smith reveal their different takes on one of America’s most captivating cities through the two elements that make Chicago so unique: its stellar architecture and its unmatched lakefront of public parks and beaches.

Individually, Chamlee and Smith have received acclaim for their striking images of places as diverse as Tuscany, Iceland, the American West, the markets of San Francisco, and a farm in Texas. Commissioned to photograph Chicago, Chamlee and Smith trained their lenses in different directions. Chamlee explored the less tamed beauty of the lakefront while Smith photographed the manmade grandeur of the Loop’s architecture. This combined book of their pictures, a first for Chamlee and Smith, unites these two visions of the Chicago landscape to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Tuned into the rhythms of Chicago buildings, Smith’s photographs in Chicago: Loop, made with an 8x20-inch view camera, offer up a horizontal view of this most vertical city. While panoramic in format, most of the photographs do not, in fact, capture wide views. Rather, these “anti-panorama panoramas” hone in on architectural patterns that formed, somewhat haphazardly, as Chicago’s downtown has grown through the decades. The result is a series of photographs that allow even Chicago natives to view the Loop, so iconic and familiar, through new eyes.

In Chicago: Lake, Chamlee returns to her roots as a painter by combining her photographs of the lakefront with her drawings, assemblages, ephemeral constructions, and writing. In her photographs and artwork, Chamlee creates a multi-layered experience that reflects the nearly seamless interplay between manmade structures and nature that flows along Chicago’s shoreline. Chicago: Lake documents the beauty—both humble and dramatic—that emerges when a teeming city revels in the good fortune of its natural environment.

Together, the distinctive visions of Chicago: Lake and Chicago: Loop unite in a book to be cherished both by admirers of fine photography and by lovers of a great American city.

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Purchase Limited Edition book with photograph(s)