Cleveland, Ohio’s Opportunity Corridor is the ‘transformative’ 3.2 mile boulevard connecting industrialized East 55th Street /I-490 and the Tremont neighborhood with North Slavic Village, the Fairfax neighborhood and the cultural/ medical institutions of University Circle, including Little Italy. Opportunity Corridor was constructed between 2013 (land acquisitions and demolitions) and 2022 (construction completed).
In 2013-2015 I photographed in the neighborhoods (homes, businesses, churches and landmarks) in the Corridor’s path, many destine for ‘transformation’ (ie. demolition), and several Opportunity Corridor road construction sites.
At the same time (2013-2015), while in the early stages photographing some neighborhoods and businesses in the path of The Corridor, I approached several Cleveland based foundations and arts institutions to partner with me for the purpose of funding a robust photographic study of the Corridor’s transformative process, from inception to post-construction. My thesis was that this historic construction project, based on the urban planning premise- ‘build it and they will come’- was calling for a comprehensive record of that event. Photography for this project paused in 2015, until 2026.
Associations of abandonment, vacancy, tires, shadows, fences, traffic, excavations, churches and even a potty are transformed by my photographic eye into compelling landscape studies.
This transformation continues to be a mystery to me.
Inspirations:
Artists: Georgia O’Keefe; Alfred Stieglitz; Minor White; Rene Magritte; Frank Lloyd Wright
The Farm Service Administration photography project (1936-1941) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by James Agee, photography by Walker Evans.
Detroit Disassembled (2010); photographs by Andrew Moore; studies of Detroit organized by The Akron Museum of Art.
The Americans- Photographer Robert Frank’s epic study of the social strata of American life.
“Boyhood”- The award-winning film, made over twelve years, depicting the growth of a boy and his family.
“Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape”, exhibition and catalog, Heinz Galleries, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, (2024-2025)
From the podcast- “Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, Carnegie Museum of Art”, Episode One:
Rachael Delue (Art Historian and scholar of American Studies, Princeton University):
“Regions, nations, cultures develop really strong associations with place, and those places come to take on, those landscapes come to take on, a certain set of meanings. And I’m really interested in those meanings in and of themselves, but I’m also interested in how artists translate those meanings, translate those deep associations—individual, regional, national—into images of the landscape. And also what happens in the act of translation because it’s never a one-to-one translation. I’m really interested in the transformations that come when someone takes a landscape with these deep associations and makes a picture of it.”
