Ron Gordon

(b.1942; resides Chicago, IL)

Shifting from a career-long use of large format cameras, this portfolio from Ron Gordon features his explorations with a handheld panoramic camera. The portfolio includes a mixture of the historic preservation work he is well-known for and the more personal work for which he is gaining a reputation. Triptychs, panoramas, cityscapes, and landscapes comprise its diversity - there is also one night scene and one interior - but throughout Gordon is consistently drawn to the strong lines of both the arboreal and the architectural.

Solo exhibitions of Gordon’s photographs include the 2005 show New Work at Chicago Arts District Exhibitions Gallery. He is the author of Ron Gordon: Selected Photographs and has served as adjunct professor of photography for architecture students at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology since 1999.

Past Portfolio

Three bodies of work are represented in Ron Gordon’s Midwest Photographers Project portfolio. The first documents Chicago architecture with such variety in view point and time of day that the resulting photographs run the gamut from elegant abstraction to postcard perfect. The second, Back Story, was photographed in Europe and features subjects always turned away from the camera. The relationship between people and the places they visit is revealed most wittily in the picture of a man whose rounded shoulders and dizzyingly patterned shirt echo the curve of the highly ornamented dome in front of him. The third group comes from Gordon’s emerging body of work regarding airplanes and the neighborhoods surrounding airports. In these pictures, a confusion of scale and depth make the large metal forms of the planes appear to tangle in telephone wires or lightly touch down in the leaves of a large tree.

Gordon earned a BA in language and literature (1965), an MA in literature (1968), and then completed preliminary doctoral studies in language and literature at the University of Illinois. He is the recipient of a Fullbright travel grant and two Focus Infinity Fund grants, and currently owns the photography studio and custom printing lab Ron Gordon Photographic Services. His work is included in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Chicago Historic Society, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Illinois State Museum, and The Paris Art Center.