Paul D’Amato’s Midway

The neighborhoods surrounding Chicago’s Midway International Airport lie against a backdrop of strip malls, fast food chains, motels, and light industry. They are communities full of hard-working people from diverse backgrounds who live and work in the shadow of airplanes that roar above their heads and rattle their homes. In this exhibition of large-format photographs, Paul D’Amato focuses on these communities that are difficult to define and the places that are often overlooked. These are the lives in the Midway; in between urban and suburban, in-between survival and prosperity.

D’Amato has been photographing the communities that surround Midway for the last 10 years. Through this body of work, he explores American life in a place that is routinely ignored by travelers hoping to fly to places far more exotic.