The neighborhoods surrounding Chicago's Midway International Airport lie against a backdrop of strip malls, fast food chains, motels, and light industry. They are communities full of hard-working people from diverse backgrounds who live and work in the shadow of airplanes that roar above their heads and rattle their homes. In this exhibition of large-format photographs, Paul D’Amato focuses on these communities that are difficult to define and the places that are often overlooked. These are the lives in the Midway; in between urban and suburban, in-between survival and prosperity.

D'Amato has been photographing the communities that surround Midway for the last 10 years. Through this body of work, he explores American life in a place that is routinely ignored by travelers hoping to fly to places far more exotic.

Paul D’Amato is a Professor of Photography at Columbia College in Chicago. His work is in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.