In the 1990s Mark Williams and Anne Weitze conceived a project to document the garage doors of Olympia Fields, Illinois, Mark’s hometown. It was inspired in equal measure by the Dublin Doorways posters, whose quaintness was then ubiquitous, and by the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Mark never completed the project, but in his memory Anne and I proceeded with the not-so-great snapshots that they took as preliminary sketches, made serviceable through Anne’s Photoshop wizardry.
These doors will be instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with mid-century suburban vistas. It was Mark’s brilliance to see past the apparently tacky decoration and recognize it as abstract art sneaking into an otherwise prosaic landscape.
The last several garage doors are from Skokie and Lincolnwood, Illinois, photographed by me many years later.
