CCLaP Photo Feature: Leif Johnson

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Chicago Center for Literature and Photography Photographer Feature February 8, 2013

Location: Chicago, Great Lakes, Texas Leif Johnson is a former Texas cowboy poet-turnedUniversity of Chicago history scholar-turned-freelance videogame journalist who is very becoming in hats. His photos are mainly of his travels, from the panoramic to the microcosmic. He now lives in Oak Park, Illinois, with his wife, Evonne, in an apartment that looks vaguely like a hobbit-hole.

One of the things I like the most about your portfolio are the haunting nighttime photos from suburban train stations. What inspired you to shoot these, and did you have a specific goal in mind?

To this day, one of the things that amazes me about the Chicago area is that so many densely populated areas assume an eerie stillness at night, and this is just as true of my old place in Hyde Park as it is of the stations in Oak Park and Elmhurst where these shots were taken.

Trains—whether the Metra, a regular freighter, or even the El—cut through that silence like a knife through hot butter. Those are the moments I’ve always tried to capture: those fleeting minutes when the trains pierce the stillness and then pass on, leaving the areas around them barely aware that they were there. There’s a certain ghostliness about those moments, I think.

Your work is an almost equal mix of rural and urban images. In which environment do you prefer shooting?

I suppose you could say this dichotomy reflects the quirks of my own upbringing.

I’ve lived most of my life on ranches in counties where the population barely exceeds 5,000 people and in the heart of the city where there might be 400 or more people living on my block alone. In the process, I’ve come to look upon anything in between with something like disdain, and my love for either extreme is such that the writings of urban activists like Jane Jacobs mean as much to me as the nature essays of Edward Hoagland. My heart, though, belongs to the wilds, and I believe that’s where I produce my best work. As much as I hate to admit it, I struggle with urban imagery, but I know within an instant if I’ve taken a remarkable shot in a natural setting. Perhaps that’s why so many of my urban shots also feature nature as a guest star.

Only a small number of your photos feature people, and many of these only tertially. Is there a particular reason for this?

I’m a very private person. I’ve always thought that I’m one of those rare people who could live out their days as a mountain man and not go crazy from the isolation. (After six months of working as a full-time freelance writer, I’m starting to doubt the truth of that.)

I’ve never quite overcome the fear that I’m intruding on someone’s privacy when I take a photo of them, and I’ve noticed that the few shots I’ve taken of people other than my wife seem tragic on a level that bothers me. But all in all, I think you’re seeing the world as I see it, and if I’m were to be honest with myself, I suppose I’d admit that there’s a hint of selfishness involved. I like to think that it ties back in to what I was saying about producing my best work among nature.

How much planning goes into your shots, and how many of these images are happy accidents?

I rarely plan any of my shots in the sense that I leave the house with a specific shot in mind, but I’ll stick around when I think that a good opportunity awaits. Take the shot above. This was taken on my way to work, and I jumped off the train at the Ashland Green Line station because I realized that the combination of that station’s perfect skyline view and the bad storm that day provided excellent conditions for a great shot. And so I stood up on the bridge, balancing my camera on the rail, until I’d finally captured the lightning shot I wanted. I was up there for around 20 minutes, and I was late to work. It was worth it.

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