Scott Strazzante thought he had a quick newspaper assignment photographing a farm in suburban Chicago. Instead, he spent the next 20 years documenting life there and on the suburban subdivision that replaced it.
His new book, “Common Ground” (PSG), pairs an elderly couple’s everyday routines on the farm with strikingly similar images of a young family in the starter-home development that replaced it. His project kind of happened, with plot twists and serendipity, much like life itself.
It started out as just another assignment, one of up to five a day Mr. Strazzante hustled to cover as a staff photographer at The Daily Southtown in suburban Chicago. In newspaper terms, it was a quick hit. Get in, take pictures, get out.
But Mr. Strazzante, a Chicago native, saw something great in the farm he photographed for a story on people raising animals in a still-rural township. The 118-acre farm, a landscape of grazing Angus cows, big old barns and wide-open pastures about a half-hour’s drive from the city, seemed magical. It reminded him of summer days spent riding tractors with his two sisters on his grandfather’s vegetable farm in southwest Michigan.
After finishing his assignment, Mr. Strazzante knew he wanted to return and take some more pictures.
He wanted to do a long-term story, one with depth. This family farm, a piece of vanishing America, fit the bill. It fascinated him, as did the couple running it, Harlow Cagwin, almost 72, and his wife of nearly 40 years, Jean.
Mr. Strazzante, like most newspaper staff members, didn’t have the luxury of spending weeks on a long-term project. But he could visit the farm off-hours, whenever he had time. The Cagwins were always working, always there.
That was in May 1994. Little did Mr. Strazzante — or his subjects — know that he would spend most of the next eight years documenting this once-quintessential part of middle America. But as the Cagwins battled health issues, economic hardship and suburban sprawl, the farm became endangered, the story more urgent.
So Mr. Strazzante kept returning, even as his career took off and he moved on to other newspapers, eventually to The Chicago Tribune. He documented the Cagwins’ farm until its last day.
One of the most powerful images in “Common Ground” shows Harlow Cagwin sitting on a stump as bulldozers erase his childhood and his life’s work in a few ruthless strokes.
As the Cagwins left to start the retired life, Mr. Strazzante thought his story was done as well.
It wasn’t. Five years later, in 2007, Mr. Strazzante was showing his farm photos to a photography class at the College of DuPage, 25 miles from the Cagwins’ old spread. A student, Amanda Grabenhofer, raised her hand. She lived on a cul-de-sac in one of some 300 single-family homes built on the Cagwin farmland.
A week later, Mr. Strazzante was back on that land, now called Willow Walk, photographing Ms. Grabenhofer’s four children at an Easter egg hunt. Looking at his images, a photo of one of the Grabenhofer children and his cousin wrestling with a jump rope on the lawn struck him. It was eerily reminiscent of an image of Harlow Cagwin wrestling a two-day-old calf in a field at approximately the same location where the Grabenhofers’ house was built.
From there, “Common Ground,” about the literal and emotional common ground of two families, began to take shape. Although not solely a book of diptychs — there are many single images — the book’s unique strength is as a document about the past and present, the transformation of the American landscape and, as the title suggests, the human story that remains constant and connected through time, lying in the side-by-side or back-to-back pairings of small moments in these families’ lives.
A photo of Harlow Cagwin lying on his bed after his cattle left pairs with an image of a Grabenhofer child, Aiden, resting after a successful invasion of his sisters’ room. A touching moment when Jean Cagwin holds her husband’s gnarled hand is reminiscent of one of Amanda Grabenhofer holding her husband’s arm as one of the children watches.
Through it all, Mr. Strazzante said, every photo in the project happened naturally.
“Some of the pairings almost seem too good to be true,” he said, “and those unfamiliar with documentary photography might assume that I helped situations along. But it was definitely a hundred percent the harder I worked, the luckier I got situation.”
Mr. Strazzante, who now works for the San Francisco Chronicle, stayed in touch with the Cagwins (Harlow Cagwin died in 2012, just short of his 90th birthday) and continues to photograph the Grabenhofers when he can.
So the story is not over. It may never be over.
“Someday — when, I don’t know — I will probably go back and make more pairings that are more thoughtful or reflect my changing vision,” he said.
He plans on stopping by when he goes home for the holidays.
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