**new location** "OBAMALAND:: early explorations in the new era." @ The COOP, Chicago June 12

• OPENING RECEPTION JUNE 12, 2009, 7-10pm *
  The COOP, 845 w. fulton market #201 (@ halsted)
  PLEASE NOTE THE NEW LOCATION!!

OBAMALAND is a project that began in January 2008 when I returned to Chicago , my hometown, where I had not lived with any great regularity since I was 15 years old. I began working as a freelance photojournalist, focusing primarily on the social and political landscape of the city I grew up in. The city of legendary elections, machine politicians, and father and son mayors for life, Barack Obama emerged as an outsider in the U.S. presidential election and has made himself into the single greatest student to date of the Chicago machine he emerged from. His campaign represented both the emergence of a new generation on the world stage while affirming the battle-tested strength of the Chicago machine. When the moment came for him to claim a hard fought victory on November 4, 2008, he greeted 250,000 people gathered in Grant Park along Chicago’s lakefront. His first words to the nation were not “my fellow Americans,” but rather “hello Chicago!”

The images in this show form an early exploration in the newly conceived psychological space: Obamaland. I did not invent this space; I have heard others – tourists, intellectuals, locals – refer to the city of gangsters and machine Democrats as “Obamaland.”

AMANDA RIVKIN, 24, is a photojournalist based in her hometown, Chicago, where she has photographed for Agence France Presse/Getty Images, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Newsweek, among others. Her work has appeared on the front pages of Le Monde, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and in such international publications as The Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and The London Sunday Times Magazine.

Amanda Rivkin: http://www.amandarivkin.com
Obamaland @ Eleanor Magazine: http://www.eleanormag.com/?p=342

IT’S ALSO AN EARLY FLAG DAY CELEBRATION!

Now there is a Facebook group. Join the ruckus:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=28601557&ref=name#/event.php?eid=67354028682&ref=nf

by Amanda Rivkin at 2009-04-11 14:20:45 UTC (ed. May 26 2009 ) Chicago , United States | Bookmark | | Report spam→