trixies

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.
For the last two weeks I’ve been working on probably the most fun project in years. For me it was the perfect alignment of a few objectives: my ambition of being a photographer, my dream of designing a book, and creating a celebration of Chicago’s uniqueness. All at the same time.

At the studio, our clients we often asked us, “what’s good in Chicago?” Well, if you polled everyone you’d get a bunch of different answers including cool bars and restaurants to interesting stores places to cultural places to go look at. Our studio also have many imports from our other studios for days, weeks or even months at a time, asking the same question. The funny thing is, the places we’d recommend don’t change that much. There’s new places all the time that come and go, by the staples we’ve recommended for years. And after years of not having this information collected in one place we thought its about time we did.

After a frantic planning phase and four days of intense photography all around the city (only two parking tickets!) we collected 2000 photos and produced a kick ass guide book to Chicago. A guide to the more curious places. A curious guide if you will.

The book features places to go shop, places to go eat, places to go stand and watch people and places to go have a drink. The many people in the studio contributed and have given their personal voices in their write ups that I think this book should be able to stand with the many other guides that exist.

I have no idea if this book will make it to the public at large but we’re getting a super small batch made as a proof of concept. I’m just happy to live in such a rich city of unique, fascinating places. For now, I would recommend the book ‘eat, shop, chicago‘ as it does a good round up of places, despite it’s overly gushy, girly writing.

Lastly, the photo above is part of a spread featuring the Trixies of Lincoln Park. May they live long and produce even more beautiful, vapid people!