Occidens: Facing West

Chicago's Trump Tower — Facing West Along the Chicago River

Occidens is the Latin present participle of occidere — to fall, to set, the sun going down in the west. Like the other Latin titles in this portfolio, it names what the image is doing rather than what it depicts.

What the image depicts is this: Chicago's second tallest skyscraper, Trump Tower, facing into the shimmering west along the Chicago River, its apex still touched by the last eastern light. But there is a longer story embedded in that geometry.

Chicago was the hinge. It was the place where the East ran out and the West began, where the railroad met the prairie and the continent's westward push had its staging ground before the next push. The city was built on that motion — on the energy of people and capital moving always in one direction. To stand at the river and look up at a tower facing west is to feel that current still.

America has always organized itself around the horizon in front. The east is where you came from; the west is where you are going. Occidens is not a lament for what is left behind. It is the last acknowledgment of it — the fading eastern light on the back of something still moving.

Provenance: Leica M11 • Voigtlander 15mm

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Occidens — Chicago's Trump Tower faces west along the Chicago River, its apex in the last eastern light.

Chicago's second tallest skyscraper viewed from the east along the river.
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Occidens: Heading West

"Occidens" is the Latin present participle of "occidere" — to fall, to set, the sun going down in the west — and the title does what the other Latin titles in this portfolio do: it names what the image is doing rather than what it depicts. Chicago's lakefront faces east, which means the city turns its back to the sunsets — the lake behind you, the towers ahead, their western facades catching a light that the lake never sees. In the last minutes before the sun drops behind the skyline, those facades go from amber to deep orange to something close to red, the sky above the lake behind the photographer deepening through blue into the first suggestion of night while the buildings are still on fire. Shot on the Leica M11, this is the moment that lasts perhaps eight minutes on a clear evening — after the day's flat light has given way and before the city's own illumination takes over. The sun falls; the city holds the light a little longer than the sky does.