Elizabeth Cwik

Architecture was going through a weird time when I was in school. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that being conversant in deconstructivism and post-structuralist literary theory wasn’t quite the flex my classmates and I had imagined; turns out that prospective Chicago employers were looking for more practical skills.

One professor though, Wojciech Lesnikowski, a bona fide intellectual, author, architect, and rebel (in that overheated environment), stubbornly taught design looking through the outmoded lens of firmness, commodity, and delight. The value of tackling difficult ideas aside, I was glad of a green light that made it ok to want to design or make images of things that I just thought were beautiful. Or interesting. Or odd.

Which is what makes photos of your travels a unique record of one person’s experience. In a world where the internet leaves no destination undocumented, travel pictures can still express a subjective reality.

I like making collages and photos because it takes things that are available to all to reconfigure, reimagine, or re-frame and make them personal whether it’s Barcelona street life, Turin’s industrial history, or northwest Arkansas’ make-do-with-less brilliance.