Angie McMonigal loves to photograph familiar buildings in ways that make you take new notice. “A lot of it comes down to seeking out patterns within the design, looking for some kind of order in what can sometimes feel chaotic,” says McMonigal, a Lincoln Square-based fine-arts and commercial architectural photographer. She attributes her eye for detail to her background in microbiology (she was a medical technologist at various local hospitals for seven years). “I’m trying to find those angles and parts of the structure that get missed when you’re looking at the whole. These are buildings you see all the time, but I look for details that make you wonder, What is this? What am I looking at?” Here, she shares insights into some of her favorites of her Chicago photographs.
BP Pedestrian Bridge
Columbus Drive between Millennium Park and Maggie Daley Park. “This is the underside, shot from the [Jay Pritzker] Pavilion,” says McMonigal. “That allowed me to get the curves and the lines — the sinuous nature of the bridge — to stand out.”
Campus North Residential Commons at the University of Chicago
5500 S. University Ave. “There’s always a sculptural element to what Studio Gang does. What drew me to isolating this segment was the contrast between the curves in the concrete and the linearity of the windows and that blue-black-white color combo.”
James R. Thompson Center
100 W. Randolph St. “There are a lot of layers going on in this image, with the reflections and the lights and the balcony. But it’s isolated in such a tight way. The reflection is warping and chaotic, but because there are horizontal and parallel and vertical lines, it’s creating order out of chaos.”
Clockwise from top left:
Peoples Gas Education Pavilion at Lincoln Park Zoo
2121 N. Stockton Dr.
Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership
610 S. Michigan Ave. “It has a faceted, geometric façade, which is mirrored in the lobby in pure white by this sculptural wall.”
Art Institute of Chicago
111 S. Michigan Ave. “This is just south of the Asian antiquities section. A friend said, ‘You’ve got to check this staircase out!’ ”
Lake Point Tower
505 N. DuSable Lake Shore Dr. “It’s the building reflecting on itself — the darker spot in the middle is the other lobe.”
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
220 E. Chicago Ave. “This is one of my favorite staircases in Chicago. I love the geometry, the patterns, the contrast of curves and lines, and the hint of blue from the skylight.”
Willis Tower
233 S. Wacker Dr. “This is one of the most difficult buildings to shoot. It’s just these big boxy volumes — there’s not a lot of ways to isolate details. This is shot with a telephoto, probably around 300 millimeters. It’s like shooting a flower with a macro lens that allows you to get up close and abstract the larger form, distill it to one element. In this instance, it was about trying to isolate the various volumes of the building within the frame.”
The Rookery
209 S. La Salle St. “This is the oriel staircase, shot from the top down. If you do the normal tour, you only get to see the lobby and shoot from the bottom up. To get access to the top floors, you usually have to pay a fee, but I’ve taught workshops there.”