Gary Cialdella, a photographer in Kalamazoo, Michgan, has published a book of his photographs entitled The Calumet Region: An American Place. The book is published by the University of Illinois Press and the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana. Included are essays by Gregg Hertzlieb, the Director of the Brauer Museum, and John Ruff, associate professor of English and director of the Freshman Core at Valparaiso University.
Cialdella has been photographing the Calumet Region for thirty years. From that work he has selected 99 duotone black-and-white photographs, the earliest dating from 1986.
Cialdella grew up in Blue Island, Illinois, located where the moraines, marshes, and streams of the Calumet Region meet the prairies. In a statement accompanying the photographs on his website, he writes,
“My photographs of Calumet address the subtlety and dramatic contrasts in this complex landscape. I recognize the tension between industry and neighborhoods, the environmental damage a photograph cannot see and the displacement of families as industries failed. . . My attention has been to the older industrial areas that follow the contour of Lake Michigan. The newer communities to the south, while a part of the region, are distanced from industry and the Lake, which for me is the heart of the Calumet region. . .
“This region is a working place, and work is still done there, but in the dynamic of the new economy it has adapted and changed . . .
“There is the beauty of the lake and the grittiness of industry side by side, nature and human activity in a tenuous dance of co-existence.”
On Wednesday November 11, at 7 p.m. Cialdella will give a gallery talk and sign copies of his book at the Brauer Museum of Art. Directions to the museum and a link to a campus map may be found here.