O'Hare

AIRPORT ON THE PRAIRIE

Photographer Robert Burley has spent three and a half years exploring and documenting virtually the entire airfield complex and the surrounding area. His more than 1,500 photographs of this unique airport landscape remind us that O’Hare Airport still retains distinctive elements of the prairie, despite all the sophisticated technology assembled there. Using a large-format 4-by-5-inch view camera, he explores familiar and unfamiliar portions of the airport-terminals, aircraft hangars, runways, and wooded fields – revealing the O’Hare hidden from busy travelers.

O’Hare: Airport on the Prairie
Chicago Historical Society, 1988 (exhibition catalogue)
Essay by Larry Viskochil