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This page has been mirrored on Webring Webspace. If you find that this server is lagging and you were planning to look around the group homepage, itself, the other location might be an option, one which might take some load off of an overtaxed server. Let's say this straight out. The primary purpose of this group, that which drives all else, is to help people find others with whom they can go out and engage in Night Photography in the city of Chicago. While the Night does give us the chance to capture some truly memorable images, it also gives us the opportunity to run into that which is best avoided, because most of the potential witnesses are asleep, and the rest can't see the action as clearly as they could have, during the day. The principle of deterrence is weakened precisely in those hours in which it would be most needed by those still up and about - when those one encounters are likelier to be tired and irritable, maybe angry about the events of a day that they haven't yet had a chance to sleep off, and vaguely sense that they won't have time to sleep off adequately, worsening their already bad moods further. The shamefully American tradition of encouraging binge drinking won't help. One will frequently run into people who, as the saying goes, smell like distilleries and so, with less of a chance to get caught, and judgement further impaired, they are that much less likely to worry about what risk remains, should they do something unpleasant. Sometimes, this something is nothing more than relieving themselves on the doorsteps of buildings, while the residents on the other side of the glass breathe a silent prayer of thanks that the offending parties didn't get more roughage into their diets. "The rain will wash most of that away, right?", they'll ask, thinking to themselves that things could really have been far worse, as indeed they could have. While drunks don't tend to as strong as they would be sober, some of them are large enough that they can still do real damage, and one doesn't need a lot of force to shove a knife through flesh, if the knife is sharp enough. One does need some strength to fire a .38 with any real accuracy, but no strength at all to fire the shot that accidentally went through somebody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on one of those magical evenings that can do so much to keep the emergency rooms in business, in a bustling city full of tourists who never seem to have an ounce of sense. Or the willingness to listen when they're being warned. Chicago has a reputation for violence for a very good reason. If you go out into this city - and I mean really out into this city, not just strolling down Rush Street, but really exploring the place - sooner or later, you are going to run into a situation you aren't going to be happy to have been present for. You might very well end up seeing things that you wish you could forget, things that you aren't going to want to talk about later on. There is a chance that as we go out into the night, that we're not going to come back. That's a chance we can cut down to being something more like a calculated risk by being as smart as we can be, without putting ourselves under house arrest during the night. That means that a certain style of moderation with which I've become associated elsewhere will not be the style you see out of me on this group. While a select mouthy few will try to deny it, including one gentlemen who was most upset to learn that I wasn't going to let him post advertising on another one of my groups, I usually moderate with a very light hand, in a forgiving way. One of my groups has well over a thousand people in it, has been running for a number of years, and to date, I have only banned two members, and let one of those back after he agreed to behave himself. The guy who's still gone was the advertiser / spammer, and even he had to follow up his misconduct with personal abuse after being asked to not do what he had been doing for a third time - he had reposted his advertisement after I took it down - before I finally ran out of patience with him. I do tend to be a soft touch - within reason - but reason won't let me be soft, as I run this group. Mellowness, in excess, can get people killed. Or raped. There's a basic strategy that one follows to get through the night - one deals with trouble by letting it drift past one. If trouble grabs ahold of you, then you do what you have to do, but there's a good chance that it won't turn out well for you, so you do your best to stay disengaged, out on the street. There's the problem. If you go out at night with somebody who acts without a clue, the trouble he attacts to himself is going to notice you. There is no hiding, no being inconspicuous, once a member of your party has gone out and grabbed attention for himself - or herself. This is why I can't be mellow or forgiving on this group. I have to weed out the idiots, even the well meaning ones, because if they get to stay, they might very well get somebody else hurt. By hurt, I don't offended or sad or feeling that he isn't be valued, I mean that somebody might end up being thrown onto the third rail on the El by a mob that thought that he had "mouthed off" to them, he might end up waiting for an ambulance that is never going to come with a third of his blood supply already gone - things that are a little bit more important than somebody else's hurt feelings. A lot more important, really. Even if Miss Manners, Emily Post and years of self esteem based education have taught many people to be properly scornful of one who would make such a shameful comment, heedless of new paradigms that teach one that reality is but a social construct, anyway, leaving one with no need to worry. Go along to get along, thinking happy thoughts all the way, and all will turn out for the best, and when it doesn't turn out for the best, the dead can, at least, be quickly forgotten, and the illusion maintained? "Is there no room for compromise?", some respectable soul will ask. No. We have to live in reality, intensely, to do this right. Not "my reality", not "your reality", just reality, and get that there is such a thing. Many people don't, especially online, where reality can be so comfortably avoided, because it isn't there, waiting to reach out and grab one. The worst threat online, if one is one of those people who can slip off into fantasy, is that one will be harassed by crazy people who don't handle disagreements. Reality for such a person is easier to ignore than to acknowledge, and so a lot of enabling will take place, leaving us with a nonsensical and dangerous consensus forming, which we dare not carry with us into an environment that really can hurt us, if we don't pay attention to it. So, how are we going to deal with that, before going out? Let's begin with a simple statement: membership in this group entitles you to nothing, not even continued membership in the group. We aren't doing radical inclusiveness in this group. If I or somebody else announces a late night outing, the time and place will probably be set by private message or e-mail, and make no mistake, if you crash one of these parties, the police will be called. Following those who don't want to be followed, at the very least, qualifies as disorderly conduct. You might get invited to come along on a trip, only after earning the trust of those running it, who can and will reject your request to come for any reason or no reason, at all. Personal discomfort is reason enough, and it's a reason you should be eager to respect. Even if the discomfort seems unreasonable. Perhaps, especially if it does - do you want a crazy person watching your back? We are going to have discussions on this group, or at least so I hope, and those discussions will allowed to meander, as long as they don't meander into politics, business, sports or anything too lurid or stupid. If you need a definition of "stupid", that's not a good sign, but I will point you in the direction of this page, if you'd like to see an example. Let's keep the discussion more interesting than that, something that requires at least a little intelligence to follow, and which can be endured by those with more than a little intelligence. The beauty of this can be instantly appreciated by anybody who has ever done improv and tried to stay in character. The longer one stays, the harder one has to work, and the effort needed seems to grow exponentially. The discussions help us to get to know each other, making the first gatherings less awkward than meetings of strangers tend to be, with everybody staring at each other, and not knowing what to say. For some of us, they'll have helped others to get to know us all too well. There are fools, and they're easily found, but there's another kind of potentially dangerous person we need to worry about, one who delights at the mayhem he causes, and one finds a lot of those people online. Imagine being on the street with a psychopath or a sociopath, and where that could lead. We need to keep that from happening, so how do we do it? By seeing what we see out of people for what it is - a theatrical performance. They create personas, as an actor will, projecting personalities that aren't their own. Our best bet at catching them, as amateurs, is to do what we do when trying to get our friends to mess up on stage - by forcing so much them to do so much extrapolation, that they slip out of character. A genuinely decent (if maybe slightly gruff) person, as the discussion wanders, might have a few positions that he needs to think out further exposed, because we all inevitably have those, and that's fine. What he won't have are any truly monstrous positions - monstrous not being a synonym for "politically incorrect". He doesn't have to think much to avoid them, because for him, to have a conscious is a matter of instinct. He knows his way through the more basic points of life, even if he can't always explain them very well. But a monster is a monster, and will often, in haste, let his true character show when a new topic arises, because reason can't get him to where the instincts that would come of having a good nature would have left him, quickly enough. He outs himself, without knowing that he has done so, giving us useful information. We get to know each other online a little, and then offline a bit more, and then, having chosen our travel companions for the evening with a prudent level of caution, go out and do some shooting. Or not. Maybe nobody will show up, and I'll be left alone, tragically alone, to fill this group with shots I'll take, travelling with people I know for reasons that have nothing to do with the Internet. Plans should stay flexible. But if this does become the more social group that I hope it will, we're going to have a few understandings. Get a pen and mark these down, because there will be a quiz, later. As anybody living in a major city knows, one does not simply classify neighborhoods as being "bad" or "good", neighborhoods where one never goes vs. those in which one carelessly does whatever one wants. There are degrees of danger, levels of caution that each place demands. We are not going to be wandering into the places where a reasonable level of caution would require a flak jacket and concealed weapons, preferably being exercised from inside of an armored vehicle. No trips to what's left of Cabrini or Englewood or the Robert Taylor homes, although Englewood, I have to admit, might be tempting. But let's not be stupid enough to act on that temptation. We won't be going into the war zones, but we're not going to be staying in Disneyland, either. There is only so much to see in places like Andersonville, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, and while a lot of it is worth recording, these are very small places. See nowhere but these, and you've missed the city. There are places like Ravenswood, which one couldn't compare to Englewood and keep a straight face, but which really aren't Disneyland. If you stay alert, pay attention to what you're doing, you'll probably be OK, but there is something that people on Flickr might tend to do, that we absolutely can't have: they might bring tripods. "We're doing night shooting, right, and I work in film, so ..." Not if you're going on one of my outings, you're not, and probably not if you're going to be active in this group. We'll work digital, or not at all, and I'll tell you why. Because by carrying a big, bulky tripod, you're advertising the fact that you're carrying expensive, fenceable equipment, and that you're encumbered, slow on your feet and likely to have a harder time because of something you won't want to drop, making yourself and us, your travelling companions, into targets - and that is our business. Maybe you'll protest, saying that you'd have enough sense to drop the tripod if you had to run, but our friend, the mugger, doesn't know that, and as I've said, once trouble's grabbed you, it's got you, and everybody who's with you. Small, digital cameras - we pull them out, click, click, we're done and we put them away, being as inconspicuous as we can, with maybe a slightly over 6 and a half foot tall half Sephardic guy leading the way. Yeah, sorry about that, but I didn't get to choose my DNA. We travel in mid sized groups of maybe about 10 - 20 people or so, probably more like 10, about the size of a group out on the town for the night. We do not dress fashionably, because fashion advertises wealth, and wealth draws muggers. We wear our thrift store best, our 20 year old coats and 10 year old jeans, and do our best to look like we're not worth mugging. While making sure that we're at least a little worth mugging - nobody is allowed in the group unless he has at least $10 on his person, because if we do get mugged anyway and somebody has nothing to give the friend with the gun, things could get ugly, and the rest of us would then be witnesses, which is not a good thing to be when the perp is right there, and law enforcement isn't around. Let us be clear on this point - we are not out there to "mix it up". We travel in groups, because the "what if they testify" concern serves as an incentive to people who would do something unpleasant to go do it somewhere else, but if somebody demands our wallets and cameras, we give them to him. So give serious thought to not bringing your best equipment. Which, I suppose, brings up to our least politically correct point of all. No women on these trips, unless somebody else wishes to run them, and those going with are warned about this, in advance. No, I don't doubt that there are women who could do beautiful work - some night photography by one of them adorns one of my groups, much to my delight, and I am a fan. But, as we wander into neighborhoods that aren't the best, I won't be able to keep them safe, none of us will, really, and just by being female, they have something that a lot of men would love to steal. No, it's not fair and it's not acceptable, but it's something that being powerless to fix, I have to build into my plans. If we can get a lot of people, enough to do a "take back the night" kind of thing with hundreds of people, I might be open to that, but in our little groups, kept small enough that a gang, in passing, wouldn't see our presence as a challenge, I'd have to be concerned with what the attackers would be doing to everybody else, even if the women who chose to came with were to say something like "I can take care of myself" or "I'll choose to run that risk". I'll respect their right to make their own choices, but not to inflict the consequences of those choices on others. This is not to say that women are unwelcome on this group, or that if they create their own travel groups and find ways to deal with the problem I just described, that I won't welcome their work. It is surely not to say that I'm happy about excluding women from my own outings. When I am in a relationship, I want to share everything I do with my girlfriend, and when I'm not, I want to be and this is surely not helping, but one can only do what one can do. I wish I knew how to do better, and certainly understand the anger and frustration of somebody who is denied freedom to which she is entitled because of the uncivilized behavior of others, but on this one, I have no solution to give, and would be doing all, myself included, a grave and dangerous disservice by pretending otherwise. If that ever changes, I'll be very glad to say something, but don't hold your breath. The gatherings are the main point of the group, but not the only point. As long as you took your photos at night, with not a hint of sunlight in the sky - dusk and dawn don't count as night - and you took them inside Chicago, or in one of the suburbs close enough in that they might as well be part of Chicago (eg. Evanston, Oak Park, Cicero, Berwyn), and the photo is safe for all ages, go ahead and submit it. If the story you have to tell took place in the same area, is suitable for general audiences, and isn't being told as a way of getting around the rules about forbidden content (politics and business), then go ahead and tell it in the discussion sections. You're always free to go out on your own, and get your own stuff. It's just that, having been the guy who did that so many times, himself, and knowing how those evenings sometimes went, I'd like to see us all have a better choice than that. Even if we have to work a little to get it. Enough of that. Let's go to the group.
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