STREAMWOOD USA

About the Streamwood USA Project

Streamwood IL, United States, 2023

Streamwood, Illinois. My home town in America for the better part of the last 15 years. Chosen for no particular reason. It’s a simple and quiet town to live with plentiful nature preserves.

In recent years, as we were slowly transitioning to living full time in Europe, we seemed to have spent more time there than in the US. As the time of a permanent move is slowly approaching, I tried to assess Streamwood, objectively, while perhaps saying my goodbyes to what has been a happy place. 

My observations have disturbed me. Maybe the last decade was spent in some sort of isolation; taking the same, familiar paths I forged for years, traveling a lot, not really paying attention to change, being locked in within a small community existing outside of the greater landscape. 

Change appears to be central in what I found. The demographics and cultural make up of this village changed fundamentally. I can’t seem to recognize things I once felt were familiar. Little patches of the old are here. The blue collar work ethic culture remains in places. But it’s being quickly pushed out by forces that are quietly overtaking this suburb in what often seem to be underhanded ways. The community I know is shrinking rapidly, sans a few holdouts that are trying to avoid a dead-end. 

An attempt to be an objective observer gave me an opportunity to discover a new world which must have existed in parallel to my own. 

In this project, I chose to depict visuals I encounter daily. My daughter’s preschool, my friend’s liquor store, my local big-box store, the empty lots and endless places of worship with less than obvious denomination and undefined ownership. Some of these places I interact with directly, while others are in my peripheral vision. But together, they make up the environment of my daily life.