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YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago When Celeste Dolan called from Moria & Company Design with an opportunity to work on the annual report for the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, I hopped at it. This particular report has a distinguished history. When I was just starting my photography career, this was one of the reports everyone wanted to work on mostly because of the high profile it had earned in the capable hands of Pat and Greg Samata. Annual report assignments come in many forms. This one, though focused, did not fit easily into a concise timetable. We were aiming to illustrate a number of ideals common to social service organization reports like leadership, responsibility, and community. Those ideals were more magnified in this case because of the report's millennium publication date. Celeste prepared a great outline for the project and together we projected some of the possible imagery we hoped to create. We ended up having to schedule 4 or 5 different events spread out over two weeks at several different Y's. In order to illustrate noble, intangible qualities in a spontaneous way using real people, I like to photograph a number of events to give me enough opportunities to create applicable images. These can be logistically challenging situations. I approach these events trying to stay in the background, trying not to get too involved in "directing" people. That means backed off lighting and a lot of patience. One of the events we photographed for this report was a Halloween party at one of the large suburban Y's. We were hoping to find intimate animated interaction between parents and children. We found a situation in which parents were not very involved with their kids, instead they were dropping their kids at various stations scattered about a large gymnasium. Adding to the ambience of the situation was a haunted house area flooded with chemical smoke, which overflowed into the main gym, creating a surreal environment with coughing kids and parents. Patience. Over the course of the next 2 hours we preserved. Patience paid off and we ended up with some very nice images from a situation, which initially did not look very promising. Celeste did a very nice job of editing and cropping and the book printed very nicely. This was not an easy project to photograph because the sporadic nature of the opportunities did not allow us to generate any kind of flow. However, everyone involved in the project really cared about the piece and went the extra mile to get it done. Project Stats:
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