Isolated Building Study 558

About the Photographer

Schalliol, David

American, b.1976

David Schalliol’s series "Isolated Building Studies" (2006-present) goes beyond the category of architectural photography to engage with questions of urban change and socioeconomic inequality and to draw out the relationships between buildings and their surrounding communities. Long interested in the abandonment, vacancy, and dereliction of residential structures, Schalliol questions what these absences in the urban environment mean. He started his investigation by sitting in a vacant lot on the South Side of Chicago every day for three months, during which time he got to know the people who spent time there. The resultant ongoing project is both photographic and sociological in nature. By creating a set of uniform compositions of isolated buildings, Schalliol hopes to reveal common patterns of the impact of political and economic forces upon different neighborhoods. This series was featured in the MoCP exhibition, "Chicago Stories: Carlos Javier Ortiz and David Schalliol."