City 2000

Inspired by the wish to capture Chicago's diversity and vibrance for posterity, an idea took shape to take "a year-long snapshot of the city," beginning with the first minute of the new millennium and ending with the last minute of the year 2000.

Containing 199 photographs drawn from the Comer Archive of Chicago In The Year 2000 at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Richard J. Daley Library, the images in CITY 2000 capture the lifestyles, architecture, spirituality, and personality of this archetypal American city with passion and creativity.

Weaving through and connecting the pictures are essays, fiction, and poetry from Chicago writers, including Rick Kogan, Studs Terkel, Rosellen Brown, Li-Young Lee, and many more. The volume's thirty-nine photographers include Yvette Marie Dostatni, Ron Gordon, Leah Missbach Day, Zbigniew Bzdak, and Bob Thall.

"The photographs in this book were not meant for the society pages. These photographers' grails are elsewhere and they have gone where the action is: a rodeo in Little Village; a baseball game on a cracked concrete field; a lonely lakefront or a dy-ing Maxwell Street; the lonely old gaffer or the tough old doll on the park bench."
-- Studs Terkel