For photographer Mark Ballogg, a visit to the studio of the octogenarian sculptor Richard Hunt turned into a six-year-long exploration. Hunt, who died last December, was one of Chicago’s best-known artists thanks to his distinctive abstract metal sculptures that found public homes in cities around the globe. “I was just absolutely mesmerized,” Ballogg says of that 2017 peek inside Hunt’s Lincoln Park workshop, filled with stacks of scrap metal in various stages of transformation. “And I thought, If I could go into other artists’ studios, I could really represent Chicago’s artist community.”
That impulse eventually took the shape of Making Space, Ballogg’s 2023 self-published photo book featuring 93 studios and quotes from many of the artists about how they approach their work. The book is now the basis of a new exhibition, on view November 8 to February 28 at Bridgeport’s Alma Art & Interiors, that displays works by 31 of the artists from it along with large-scale prints of the photos.
Ballogg brought what he considered an outsider’s eye to the project, despite his own history as a collector of local art and a nearly four-decade career as an architectural photographer. “I have always struggled with calling myself an artist,” he says. “So the project started to become a way for me to suss out my path for myself with my own practice, seeing into the lives of artists and the way they work, and starting to realize that the sky’s the limit and that I can do whatever I decide I want to do.”
The images in Making Space testify to Ballogg’s eye for unexpected detail, while also representing a new frontier in his own work. “I was freed up from satisfying someone else’s needs, like an architectural client. A lot of the photographs are more akin to still lifes than interiors.”
Similarly, Ballogg’s architectural background created expectations among some of the participating artists that he found himself having to temper. “I explained to them, ‘This is not going to be a document of your studio. That’s not the point of this. I’m trying to make images that reveal something; I’m looking for a little secret.’ ”
Some of those secrets will be revealed in minute detail in the exhibition prints, which have a depth that can’t be seen in the pages of a book. “I bought a special camera to do this project that has a medium format sensor and allows me to make 30-by-40-inch and 40-by-60-inch prints. So there’s a dimensionality. And some of the overall shots, when they get large, you kind of fall into them, right? And you can read detail on a can, you can read the [artist’s] writing.”
Final decisions about how to organize the exhibition were still being discussed when we spoke in early September, but Ballogg liked the idea of putting some separation between the artists’ works on display and the images of the places where that art was born. “It’ll be interesting for some people to go and find the piece that matches the photograph. It can be kind of like a little hunt.”