Seeing eye to eye

Five photographers create a chain of community connection

By Liz Jaros

Wednesday Journal, Inc. Contributor

The human eye looks for the human eye, photographer Karen Zaworski believes. When a live subject is featured in a picture or painting, viewers are compelled to meet its gaze. "And in a community setting, when we walk into a store or a crowd, we're always looking for the eyes of someone we know," she adds. "Adults do it. Kids do it. Even dogs do it. It's an innate thing, I think."

Nearing the end of a group project that pooled the talents of five Oak Park photographers to create a village-spanning, pictographic acquaintance chain, Zaworski has upped considerably her odds of eyeing a familiar face in town.

On a walk down Lake Street, for example, she might catch a glimpse of Nzingha Nommo through the window of Afri-Ware Bookstore before spotting music teacher Amy Pappageorge at a sidewalk cafe. She might recognize Estelle Carol, historian for the 1970s-era Women's Movement, in line for popcorn at the movies or pass St. Giles' associate pastor, Rev. Kombo Peshu, outside the bookstore.

By the time she heads home, chances are, she'll feel pretty darn connected to her 50,000-member community. But a year and a half ago, before a remarkable web was spun between Zaworski and 125 of her neighbors, an outing like this might have been considerably less life-affirming.

The plan

Each of five photographers would choose five Oak Parkers they loved, admired or were curious about and shoot their portraits. Each of those five subjects would then choose his or her successor, following the same criteria, and so on and so on until five degrees of separation from the original subjects had been achieved. In the end, a chain of interrelationship would be photographically depicted in a walk-through exhibit at the Oak Park Public Library.

"The whole thing was a marketing idea originally," recalls Deb Donnelley, the project's mastermind. Having lived in town for just a couple of years, she was looking to get her name out and connect with the neighborhood. "But while I knew it would be a great project for me, I began to think it would be more interesting with more voices. It quickly moved out of the marketing arena and became something much bigger."

Donnelley, who'd recently published a photo/essay book called In the Company of Sisters, says she approached Karen Zaworski, Nancy Hlavacek, Cindy Trim and Diana O. Rasch – all portrait photographers from town and in some ways, her competition – to see if they wanted in on the plan.

"Basically, I was like, 'Hey, do you want to do this project with me?" Donnelley recalls. "It'll take about a year and we'll have to come up with $20,000. How does that sound?" But despite the daunting logistics, and the fact that these women were vaguely acquainted if at all, to her amazement, they all said yes.

"I liked the premise of the project – that the subjects would care about those whom they chose to succeed them," recalls Diana O. Rasche, who has a diverse photography background but has never done anything like this. "And it was a way to shoot differently, more artistically, than how I shoot my paying clients."

"In a world where 'virtual' community is the word of the day, I thought it would be great to participate in the building of an 'actual' community from scratch," Zaworski adds. "What can you create by just asking people who they know?"

The process

"My goal was not to make everyone the same photographer," Donnelley says. Each artist had a distinctly different style, she knew. The portraits would not and should not all look the same. But while stringent guidelines would not be set with regard to issues like color vs. black and white, location vs. studio and posed vs. unprompted subjects, some general parameters had to be laid down at the start.

Initially, there was some disagreement over whether or not this needed to be a true microcosm of the greater Oak Park community, Donnelley says. Much of the town's beauty, she believes, lies in its diversity. So she wanted to see a broad sampling of age, gender, ethnicity and culture. But others were against driving the piece toward that end.

"With five strong women in a room, a consensus is not always possible, so majority rules," she observes. "It was hard for me ... I had to learn to relinquish control."

Ultimately, the group agreed to let subsequent chain links fall where they may. And in the end, all would probably agree, they wound up with a pretty fair snapshot of the community anyway.

The people

"One of my first five was Ellen Holleman, retired music director for the middle school," Cindy Trim recalls. "I'd always admired her from afar because she really raised the quality of the music program here, so I was terrified to ask her to do this."

When Holleman initially declined, Trim says she was crushed but not defeated. Calling her one last time to beg, Trim says Holleman was poised to reject her again but couldn't. "When I mentioned that my daughter played in the band, she said, 'How could I say no to the mom of a trumpet player?'"

Trim, a 15-year Oak Park resident and lifelong shutterbug whose goal was to capture her subjects' essences on film, says she was moved in some way by every one of them. In one of her sequences, the family of a one-year-old cancer survivor recommended a family helper, who recommended a midwife, who recommended her temple cantor, who recommended a former temple president, Deb Spector.

"I photographed Deb and one of her daughters setting the Passover-seder table," recalls Trim. "Throughout the room there were inherited reminders from their family. It was very touching."

Nancy Hlavacek, who's been taking portraits in Oak Park for 15 years and living here for 34, opted for a minimalist look with her photos, instructing her subjects to dress in black and come in for studio shots. "I didn't ask them to smile or pose," she recalls, "And I got to choose the pictures that would be featured, so it was all very liberating."

"Everyone was really trying to grow with this," Donnelley says. "We all tried something that moved us out of our comfort zones." Zaworski, who specializes in black-and-white children's portraiture, learned to negotiate with the scarier, much less spontaneous adult set. Cindy Trim, who had done most of her work in a studio, got out in the field. And Donnelley, who'd photographed mainly women, traversed to the world of men.

"I found that I really do well with the over-60 set," Donnelley says with a laugh. One of her most cherished photos features landlord Felio Marani, in the basement of one of his apartment buildings, smoking a cigar. "He was just so great and so sporting about it," she recalls. "I also shot Lou from Al's Grill and Jerry Lordan from Fenwick. I got to meet people that I would never meet in my existing social circles."

Surprisingly, Rasche, whose chain linked her to a massage therapist, a gay social worker, an artist/house dad, a village trustee, a housing programs manager, and a double amputee, among others, says her subjects did not seem to struggle with the task of choosing their successors. "They usually knew right away or had to choose between a couple of special friends."

And with a few exceptions, according to Donnelley, every potential subject approached throughout the project was game for the experience.

The product

With a grant from the Illinois Arts Council and great moral and financial support from local businesses and administrators, Donnelley and crew are now nearing the end of their unusual journey.

Beginning with an open house in the Gallery Room at the Oak Park Public Library on Saturday, June 3 from 3 to 5 p.m. and continuing through June 28, "You Are Here: Oak Park" will soon be up and running, or at least hanging. Ranging in size from 4-by-6 to 20-by-24 inches, the images will be mounted on gator board and suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room to form a pictorial community.

"Essentially we'll be creating a crowd," Zaworski says. "People will be moving around the images, turning corners." On the walls, a pushpin map and a massive proof poster with writing space will invite the exhibit's viewers to pen their reactions or document their own relationships. "It'll be interesting because even if you don't know someone in the photographs, you might know someone in the room, or you might know someone new when you leave."

And that's pretty much the whole idea.

In the days that precede the exhibit's opening, Trim says, radio station WBEZ will be airing an interview she and Donnelley gave about the project and spotlighting nine of the group's subjects on its daily 848 segment.

The fact that this project is garnering attention from outside Oak Park, Trim says, "Really speaks to our relationships with each other in this unique community. I'm so excited about this, I could go on and on. I can't wait to share it with everyone."