Feng Liu Chicago | Feng Liu Street Photography

Chicago: A City Seen Through My Lens

In 1999, I moved from Shanghai, China, to Chicago. Everything about the city felt new to me. I was immediately captivated by its colorful culture, its people, and its extraordinary energy. I was stunned by a vitality and power that I had never experienced—and, until then, had never even imagined. Amid the noise, movement, architecture, and constant change, I felt a strong urge to respond to this remarkable city. I wanted to understand it, but I also wanted to remember it. Photography became my way of doing both.

Photography had been a lifelong passion of mine. Although my first job in Chicago was as an engineer, I soon found myself spending much of my free time walking the streets with a camera. I photographed what caught my eye, but more importantly, I photographed what moved me: people at work and at play, celebrations and ordinary moments, grand architecture and quiet corners, moments of generosity and moments of solitude. Through my lens, I began to build a personal relationship with my new city.

Chicago struck me as a true melting pot. Its streets brought together people whose families and traditions came from nearly every corner of the world. Everywhere I looked, I could find traces of different cultures—food, clothing, music, religious traditions, festivals, family gatherings, and neighborhood rituals. What impressed me most was that these traditions did not simply disappear into a single American identity. They were respected, practiced, and preserved.

Yet the more I photographed Chicago, the more I began to see something beyond its diversity: similarity within difference.

People came from different countries, spoke different languages, and carried different histories, but many shared the same fundamental hopes and qualities. I saw a love of freedom and opportunity, warmth and generosity, openness and optimism. I saw people who were hardworking, resourceful, independent, and willing to build something better for themselves and their families. Chicago's diversity was not merely a collection of separate cultures. It was an ongoing conversation among them.

In many ways, the city changed the people who came to it, just as those people changed the city. Each community left its mark on Chicago, while Chicago, in turn, became part of each community's story.

That realization became increasingly important to my photography.

Chicago is, in many ways, a miniature version of America. Its many neighborhoods reveal different histories, identities, and ways of life, yet they coexist within one city. I began to see the city not simply as a collection of buildings and streets, but as a living organism—one shaped every day by the millions of individual lives unfolding within it.

Since 1999, I have photographed Chicago and its people extensively. I have photographed a wedding party making its way down Michigan Avenue and a restaurateur delivering boxes of food to homeless people living beneath the bridges. I have photographed the skyline and the streets, neighborhood gatherings, parades, festivals, celebrations, workers, families, strangers, and countless fleeting moments that might otherwise have disappeared without a trace.

I photographed not only the spectacular moments, but also the ordinary ones. In fact, I came to believe that the ordinary moments often reveal a city most honestly.

I spent countless days canvassing Chicago with my camera, searching for moments that expressed the city's personality. Sometimes I knew immediately that I had encountered something meaningful. Other times, I simply photographed what was in front of me and only later understood why it mattered. A photograph can preserve far more than an image. It can preserve a feeling, a relationship, a moment in time, and a piece of a city's collective memory.

At the turn of the millennium, I felt an especially strong desire to create a lasting record of Chicago as I experienced it. I wanted my photographs to become part of a visual history—a record that might someday allow people who had never lived through that time to see how the city looked, but also to sense how it felt.

My hope has always been that these photographs will live beyond the moment in which they were taken. Long after the buildings have changed, businesses have closed, neighborhoods have evolved, and people have moved on, photographs can remind us of who we were. They can teach future generations not only about a city, but also about ourselves.

Over the years, I have come to understand that a city is never finished. Chicago is constantly being reborn. It lives, grows, changes, sometimes loses pieces of itself, and then creates something new. Its streets carry memories of the past while simultaneously making room for the future.

Perhaps this is what first captivated me in 1999. I arrived in Chicago as an engineer from Shanghai, looking at a new world through the eyes of an outsider. Photography gave me a way to enter that world—to observe it, question it, appreciate it, and ultimately become part of it.

I came to Chicago to build a life. Along the way, I found a city worth documenting.

And through my camera, I discovered that documenting Chicago was also a way of documenting the extraordinary human experience of becoming part of a place—and of watching that place become part of you.