Four years ago, while working at Groupon as a photographer, Timothy Burkhart was toying around with an old camera on the side. “This one time, I accidentally loaded a roll of film twice,” he says. The double exposures he got were as dramatic as they were unintentional. “That mistake organically led to this project.”

Since then, Burkhart and photographer Stephanie Bassos, a former coworker, have collaborated on a unique ongoing series called People vs. Places. The premise: Using 1980s point-and-shoot Nikons, each photographer shoots a roll of film—Bassos, 33, mostly snaps portraits, and Burkhart, 30, focuses on landscapes. Then they swap undeveloped rolls. The results provide an unexpected lens on the world. “We never tell each other where we’re shooting,” says Burkhart. (Both will sometimes take up to four months to finish a roll.) “So much of this project is left to chance.”

Chicago commissioned the duo to turn their cameras on six neighborhoods—using one roll of film for each. Here are our favorites. —Elly Fishman