400 N. Peoria commemorative stamp on postcard envelope, created by Kioto Aoki and Jan Tichy. Image courtesy of Kioto Aoki.

On an unusually warm evening at the end of March in Chicago, an exhibition opening created a palpable buzz in the photography community. Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them was the latest and most ambitious iteration of The Chicago Cluster Project, displaying works by 24 artists in the former Hedrich Blessing Photographers studio and offices, in Chicago’s Fulton Market District. Sprawling through the sleek 10,800 sq. ft. industrial building of raw concrete walls and windows that amplified the golden hour light, the works were an exploration of photographic history through a variety of archives and activations of photographic materials. Undeniably, with attendance of over 200 people at that opening, this was also an activation of a dynamic community with its own significant stake in the history of photography and its pedagogy.

Installation view of I had never seen her face so red by Kat Bawden, in the exhibition Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them. Image by Kat Bawden.

In the exhibition, a diverse group of artists presented their explorations of the multitudes of the photographic archive–interpreting an array of materials including prints, glass lantern slides, postcards, magazines, copy negatives, and 35mm slides. Some artists were primarily concerned with examining the content of the archival materials, stretching the bounds of their research and confronting incomplete histories. But many others chose to expand their interpretive approach to include the many forms and evolving mechanisms used for creating, amplifying, and circulating photographic images, activating old cameras and incorporating apparatuses like overhead projectors, light tables, slide projectors, flash bulbs, and a View-Master in their investigations. Through these varied methods, Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them presented expansive reinterpretations of visual archives, with a focus on practice and process that made the projects feel alive, in flux, and not too polished.

Installation view of flat pieces of paper with very straight borders by Jonas Müller-Ahlheim. Image by Jonas Müller-Ahlheim.

At the helm of The Chicago Cluster Project is Jan Tichy, artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), whose teaching and artistic practice has been animated by new interpolations of the history of photography and the archives of visual culture. Tichy’s predilection to take a critical lens to photographic collections and their means of interpretation can be traced back over a decade ago, when the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago commissioned Tichy to cull through their extensive collection to propose new methods for access and display, and to create an exhibition. What emerged from that investigation, in which Tichy assumed the role of artist, curator, and project leader, was a redesign of the museum’s online interface and a dense permanent collection exhibition, with assistance from a group of graduate students assembled by Tichy. Thus, explorations of archives as a pedagogical framework have been an undercurrent for quite some time.

The Chicago Cluster Project began in 2020 when Tichy was invited by Rod Slemmons, a curator, educator, and writer with a distinguished career as a museum director at the Seattle Art Museum and MoCP, to engage with his photography collections as a site for discursive and creative inquiry. Slemmons and Tichy have a shared interest in utilizing historical materials as resources for education and contemporary practice, so Tichy realized the opportunity to create a platform for artists to work through photographic history by way of working with these materials.

Installation view of the exhibition Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them. Image courtesy of Jan Tichy.

Tichy began by inviting educators and photo-based artists to experiment with the Slemmons collection of historical cameras. As a curator, his choices reflected a desire to activate not only the cameras but also to represent different generations and different schools of photography within Chicago. Artist-educators including Cecil McDonald, Jay Wolke, and Shawn Michelle Smith were among the first to deploy a historical camera of their own choosing to create a new body of work; these first solo exhibitions of the Chicago Cluster Project occurred from 2021 to 2023 at a small gallery within Epiphany Center for the Arts, and these projects were all included within the group context of Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them. In the first of The Chicago Cluster Project exhibitions in 2021, Tichy fittingly collaborated with Slemmons, via rolls of film which Slemmons had captured using his early twentieth-century Kodak No. 1 Panoram camera in a forest behind his house but never printed. Tichy scanned and printed the negatives, enlarged to an enormous scale, but kept them in their negative state. Recontextualized again, suspended in the cavernous space for this exhibition, the prints resembled a fantastical version of their precursor, like freshly developed film hung to dry.

Working with historical imaging devices was taken as an opportunity to reconsider the constraints of cameras with rudimentary or unusual mechanics while delving into the history of photographic technology. Indeed, collaborators Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman referred to their work as a form of time travel, reviving a Radiopticon postcard projector and an 1893 Kodak BullsEye #2 box camera to create idiosyncratic views of the Milwaukee River with a combination of analog and digital methods. Similarly, Juan Fernandez activated a Rochester View 11×14” view camera with a combination of modern technology (laser cut masks and 3D printed film holders) and traditional darkroom techniques to create complex geometric patterns made with multiple in-camera exposures.

The Slemmons camera collection also contains several motion picture cameras, and Kioto Aoki utilized the Bell & Howell Filmo Double 8mm series camera to create Double Run Eight, a quirky 16mm film with spontaneous juxtapositions made possible by the peculiar mechanism of this camera. By running 16mm gauge film stock through the camera twice and retaining the un-spliced double 8 format, quadrants of converging movement provide a disorienting viewing experience, amplified in this exhibition’s iteration by the two-channel projection. Accompanying the film were contact prints of the negatives made using a Kodak 16mm Enlarger camera, also from the Slemmons collection, further underscoring Aoki’s poetic lexicon within the analogue form.

Installation view of Double Run Eight by Kioto Aoki in the exhibition Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them. Image courtesy of Kioto Aoki.

Still from Double Run Eight by Kioto Aoki. © Kioto Aoki, 2022.

The photographic archive, in its numerous forms and complex mutations, has provided a fecund theoretical and conceptual terrain for artists, theorists, educators, and historians for at least the past 50 years. In opposition to the archive’s presumed stasis as a repository of evidence, contemporary artists have approached the archive of visual culture as a site to be appropriated, interpreted, and dismantled. This practice definitively entered the zeitgeist with the influential 2008 exhibition Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art organized by Okwui Enwezor for the International Center of Photography in New York. Interest in the records of shared visual history amongst scholars, artists, and cultural workers at large has wildly proliferated in the subsequent years.

Meanwhile, the archive, as both site and practice, has exponentially grown in recent decades, amassing a digital footprint as consequential as the physical materials themselves. Yet, even within an era of rapid digitization, there are many more photographic archives than places to house them, not to mention the limited capacity of institutions to digitize materials and make them publicly available, putting many archives as risk. Many institutions, publications, or individual custodians unable to navigate these challenges have simply discarded materials–or found unlikely new custodians in someone like Tichy, who has amassed a growing number of image archives (as well as discarded photographic equipment) over the past decade.

With this accumulation, many challenges and conundrums emerge–theoretical, affective, and logistical. Through the curatorial statement, Tichy signaled some of these concerns by noting that contemporary image production intersects with nearly every facet of the global economy and ecology, carrying significant social, economic, political, and environmental consequences. In his role as curator of Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them, Tichy invited artists and educators to examine these concerns, activate various collections of photographic materials, and expand the notion of the archive to include pedagogical impulses.

Installation view of I had never seen her face so red by Kat Bawden. Image by Kat Bawden.

To cut through the accumulation, the collector assumes an important role, an arbiter with their own prerogatives. More simply, an archive is not a neutral site, but a reflection of certain research interests or values. In this exhibition, the role of the intermediary––including Tichy as a conduit––was brought to the foreground in numerous projects, animating the accumulative effect of a photograph’s many histories. This was especially evident in the installation by Kat Bawden, I had never seen her face so red. Working with the disposed archive of Israeli-American musicologist and art historian Hannah Abrahmson, Bawden sifted through thousands of 35mm slides containing photographs of Western modern and religious art, which Abrahmson used in her research and teaching. Among these images, Bawden discovered dozens of slides of personal photographs, which had been physically altered to cut a man from each frame, leaving a group of women intact. Bawden enlarged these personal photographs, juxtaposed with an elaborate installation of the historical slides, cleverly utilizing the windows and glass walls of the second-floor space. Intriguing as these juxtapositions were, the intimacy of this scene of anonymous women and its inferred violence put on display was unsettling. Without any context, these intimate fragments can engender a gaze that precariously elicits our own projections.

Installation view of flat pieces of paper with very straight borders by Jonas Müller-Ahlheim. Image by Jonas Müller-Ahlheim.

For many contemporary artists, the allure of the archive is manifold: photographs have their own hidden impulses, and artists can pursue these currents in unexpected ways through their own methodologies and imperatives. Many projects within Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them demonstrated this circuitous relationship with the source material. Drawing from their wide-ranging interests in science, mythology, and speculative fiction, Sarah and Joseph Belknap worked with discarded National Geographic magazines from the SAIC Flaxman Library to propose a counter-history of the photographs made during Apollo missions to the Moon, creating extraordinarily tactile mini-monuments of limestone and lunar regolith, embedded with photographs. In alignment with his interests in the sociality of the built environment, Jonas Müller-Ahlheim assembled structured vignettes to present work from the Slemmons collection. Apparatuses like the overhead projector and lightboxes and desks turned sideways were used to invoke the dialectical processes of photography, suggesting moments of transmission, both pedagogical and perceptive, as well as the fugitive nature of photographic meaning.

Installation view of Our American Forest by Matt Siber. Image courtesy of Matt Siber.

Working with historical photographs made by the Seattle-based photo studio of Darius and Tabitha Kinsey documenting the booming logging industry in the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century, Matt Siber created Our American Forest to examine the simultaneous (and contradictory) reverence for and destruction of ancient trees around that time. Identifying several old trees in the Chicago area that would have been standing a century ago, Siber created new photographs of trees, subsequently overlaid with a simplified graphic illustration of the steam-powered machines that were used in the logging industry––a satisfying call-and-response with Kinsey’s photographs of the machinery. Working with historical archives was a new method for Siber, yet the project has an uncanny connection to his motivations as an artist: by amplifying the labor of the photographer and emphasizing the machines that were used in the destruction of old forests, he prompts questions about the inevitable commodification of natural resources in the American West.

Bur Oak, Midway Plaisance, Chicago, 14’ circ., est. 225-275 y.o. © Matt Siber, 2025

Most profoundly, collaborating with the photographic archive offers artists an opportunity to deconstruct power dynamics, interrogate absences, and mend fragmented stories through their own positionality, research, and affective responses. Within an initiative like The Chicago Cluster Project, these encounters may happen unexpectedly, through intermediaries and the unforeseeable movement of collections–until photographs fortuitously land in the hands of someone who can perceive in them a subliminal register. When Selena Kearney received a portion of the Slemmons collection from Tichy containing over 400 historical photographs of Native Americans, she patiently unraveled their presence. Despite a lack of contextual information, Kearney, who grew up on the Chehalis Reservation in Washington State, immediately recognized the sites of two boarding schools for Native children: Tulalip and Cushman. Moving past romanticized ethnographic portraits in the collection, it was these photographs of Native children, posed in rigid formations, that Kearney viscerally understood as emblems of assimilation policies. Veiling these photographs with charcoal from a Suquamish beach and paired with architectural drawings of an Indian Industrial School constructed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Shadowy Evidence presented her startling reinterpretations of these photographs. The burden of agitating these grim histories was more than evident in the charcoal-laden gestures across the prints.

Installation view of Shadowy Evidence by Selena Kearney. Photo by Eugene Tang.

Shadowy Evidence. © Selena Kearney, 2025.

To reveal the cultural biases found in the archive, Kioto Aoki responded to a cabinet card found in the Slemmons collection with a simple inscription on the back: “A Japanese Girl.” While she displayed the back of this cabinet card, Aoki’s elegant installation of double-sided frames repeatedly denied the viewer the opportunity to see the frontal view–the presumed face of “a Japanese girl.” Instead, Aoki assembled a counter-archive of found images depicting traditional Japanese updo hairstyles and self-portraits showing her own signature bun–yet never showing a face. Putting her long-running series of whimsical self-portraits in this new context demonstrated the ways that working in the archive can provide added dimension to an artist’s work. Moreover, Aoki’s A Japanese Girl and Kearney’s Shadowy Evidence provided a salient intervention, disrupting the archive’s ostensible authority and resisting the colonial gaze so often found in historical photographs.

Installation view of A Japanese Girl by Kioto Aoki. Image courtesy of Kioto Aoki.

Installation view of A Japanese Girl by Kioto Aoki. Image courtesy of Kioto Aoki.

When we think of the photographic archive, invariably we are referring to boxes of prints, glass plates, binder of negatives, and photographic ephemera. But these are only a part of the archive of photographic history; the apparatuses of photography and the spaces where photographic knowledge has been honed and transmitted–like darkrooms, classrooms, and studios–also hold this history. A space such as the former studio and offices of Hedrich Blessing Photographers is a perfect example, and this is what made the setting of Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them so remarkable. Renowned for their innovative approach to capturing the essence of architecture, Hedrich Blessing was the preeminent architectural photography firm in Chicago for nearly a century, capturing an indelible history of the city. Activating this site was a revelatory and serendipitous move, and adopting Ken Hedrich’s early motto for the firm, “Don’t make photographs, think them,” was equally fitting for an exhibition that looked to the histories of image production to address contemporary concerns. Tichy’s perseverance as curator and organizer, with assistance from SAIC graduate students and the generous efforts of the artists, made this brief exhibition a generative event that firmly placed The Chicago Cluster Project within the storied chronology of photographic history in Chicago.

Installation view of the exhibition Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them. Image courtesy of Jan Tichy.

Installation view of the exhibition Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them. Image courtesy of Jan Tichy.

Don’t Make Photographs, Think Them was on view at 400 N. Peoria, the former Hedrich Blessing Photographers studio and offices, from March 28–April 27, 2025.

Kristie Kahns works in the photographic field as a writer, image-maker, educator, and independent researcher, based in Chicago.