The Artist Whose Photographs Capture the “Infinite Outcomes,” Changing Seasons of Chicago’s Lakefront Landscape

Touring Chicago’s Lakefront with Geoffrey Baer premieres Monday, April 14 at 7:00 pm on WTTW, the PBS app, and wttw.com/lakefront.

What do you picture when you think of a landscape? A meadow beneath a mountain? An open prairie? A vast desert? What about the convergence of a Great Lake and a city skyline? For Chicago-based artist Lincoln Schatz, the city’s shoreline on Lake Michigan is a powerful landscape with endless possibilities for artistic expression and communing with nature. 

“I’m deeply interested in the cultural role that landscapes play in terms of the narratives that we develop around place, and how those narratives inform who we are and how we understand and approach our world,” Schatz says. “The line of demarcation between land and lake in Chicago is totally created. We made that. That razor-sharp line between this urban environment and then wilderness – it’s hard to find that in other places.”

Schatz is a contemporary artist working in photography, video, and new media. His art has been shown all over the world, including at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Schatz grew up in Chicago, and his dad frequently took him to the lake. Schatz said as a “city boy,” he has often been drawn to traveling and photographing different natural landscapes, in search of vistas that are different from ones he grew up with. He didn’t have the same kind of relationship with Lake Michigan as a natural landscape, and he noticed that the Great Lakes hadn’t drawn the same attention from artists and thinkers. Instead, the Great Lakes are often considered for their economic role in the development of the Midwest, for transit, or commerce. 

“The Great Lakes, in my opinion, were never canonized the way that the Adirondacks or the Hudson River or even the Ohio Valley were,” Schatz said. “It seems that when you look through literature and look through paintings, the Great Lakes didn’t get that treatment in the way that you have the Hudson River School.” 

He sought to change that beginning in September of 2015, when he set out to capture Lake Michigan in Chicago, evoking the kind of landscape artwork more often found miles and miles away from an urban center. He started going to the lakefront (typically somewhere between Oak Street and Belmont Avenue, and also near 35th Street) five to six days per week at various times of the day. He now has an expansive series of photograph collections of the lake, including one called The Shore 2025. When he began taking photographs of the lake nearly 10 years ago, he didn’t have high hopes.

“I was convinced that nostalgic, saccharine images would be all that I could generate. But if that’s what happened, then at least I tried the experiment,” he said. But that’s not what happened. “The range of possibilities in that landscape was much greater than I had been aware of.”

What Schatz might find on any given day is guided by three variables: light, the lake itself, and the weather. “What’s really astonishing is the infinite outcomes of those three variables, and that continues to compel me to this day,” Schatz said. “I get up in the morning on the way to the lake, and I’m like, ‘What will I find today?’ And it has never, ever disappointed me”

Schatz believes the weather and the seasons shape how we tell stories about our relationship to the landscape. Take two extremes for example: A dangerous, icy morning on Lake Michigan with volatile waves may result in a photograph with a sense of foreboding, while a calm, deep blue lake on a summer day instills a sense of harmony. 

“That relationship starts to shift between the landscape and human beings as the lake changes in different ways,” Schatz says. “I really have come to ascribe or tell stories in my own mind about the different moods of the lake, and there’s just an infinite range of those within the two poles.”

Schatz has observed every season on Lake Michigan, each with its own distinct personality. Spring, he says, is often defined by the storms, by the “aggressive nature of summer coming,” a shift in the light, and the slow return of people to the lakefront. During summer, there’s a feeling of community.

“There’s people who are just sitting looking out at the lake. There’s a point of contemplation and maybe we share some of the same ideas – maybe spiritual ideas, maybe landscape ideas, maybe ideas of solitude – but in the summer, it’s almost like a high water mark of democracy,” Schatz says. “Everybody’s out there and they’re more or less getting along. It’s just like a celebration of the lake itself.”

In the fall, it all transforms once again. Fewer people flock to the lakefront. “The color of the sky changes: the fall blue I think is very different from the summer blue. It’s a bit more silver and less warm,” he says. “As the light starts to change again, you feel it. It’s almost like as a species we’ve been around for so long, like we clock these changes internally…There’s some solace out there. It’s really beautiful.”

But winter is Schatz’s “hands-down favorite” time of year to capture the lake. “There’s an aspect of solitude out there in the wintertime and then the transformation in these unpredictable ways, it’s so deeply alluring,” he says. He was looking back at a photograph of the lake recently that was taken after it had snowed. Lake Michigan was frozen as far as the eye could see.

“There’s this magic time as the sun is setting where you get this deep blue, almost purple light just for a couple minutes, and then it devolves into no light,” he says. “That photograph was just otherworldly. There was an emotional resonance to it that was undeniable.”

After a decade of capturing the changing nature of the lakefront and thinking about how the lakefront makes us feel and how it shapes the stories we tell about ourselves, photographing Lake Michigan has become a kind of ritual for Schatz. He has indefinite plans to continue taking these photographs, saying he keeps waiting for an “internal turkey timer” to go off that still hasn’t sounded; he still finds that the lake surprises him. While some people plan their activity on the lake around the weather, or a particular social event, Schatz says his philosophy is to get there when he gets there and get what he gets. 

“I’ve tried to move that into my life as well,” he says. “Whatever I get, wherever I am, that’s just what it is. And there is beauty in all of that.”