2025 12 19

Winter drive, rural Illinois. February, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Here’s a snap from one of my Illinois Project outings a few years back. Admittedly, I’ve been severely neglecting this project as finding the time to escape the city has been challenging. We’re also down to one car in the household and we now have a dog, which has me further considering focusing my time on something closer to home. All this to say, I haven’t given up on this project, but without an identity or focus it will likely struggle to materialize. In the coming weeks, I will post more images from the project in hopes of discovering a through line.

-Clayton

2025 11 11

Hope (on the highway). Chicago, Illinois. October, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

It’s been a busy year and I haven’t been able to work on my Illinois Project much, annoyingly. Because of this, I now have a new project brewing in my head that is closer to home. For now, we’ll call it The Chicago Project. As is the case with all of my photo projects, I’m not really sure, yet, what it is, but I’ve been really inspired by my travels around town and think I can bring an interesting perspective to a subject that has been documented and captured countless times over. Time will tell. For now, there is hope.

-Clayton

2025 11 09

Sunrise (the best one I’ve seen!) over Chicago, Illinois. October, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

Recently I wrote about waking up early after being up late, and how as a freelance photographer you don’t really get sick days (see: 2025 10 15). This is the sunset I was treated to on that drive. The photos never do them justice and it’s cringe to post photos of them on your blog.

-Clayton

2025 09 26

Solo cloud. Somewhere west of Chicago, Illinois. August, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

In designing my new zine project, I wanted the size to be Goldilocks; not too large but also not too small. I like the idea of letting the images shine on their own, and printing too small can remove some of the magic, in my opinion. That said, going bigger gets expensive and becomes a hassle to ship and handle. I settled on 8” x 10” vertical layout, despite the fact that I would’ve preferred a less wide (ie: an even smaller) form. The two factors that led me to compromise, in a sense, were: a) I much prefer horizontal images and get triggered by how much I’m almost forced to shoot vertical these days because of the cell phone. The winder aspect ratio allows for more room for horizontal images; and b) the added room on the page allows for some creativity in layout design. While the aim is to keep things relatively simple, I love the fact that zines are lower stakes productions and you can have a bit more fun with them. My goal is to partner with designers on future issues and explore more possibilities.

This image will likely get printed in a future zine. Be on the lookout for it in the year 2027. Seriously though, the “visual journal” zines I will be producing will be running a few years behind when I actually made the images. They gotta cook, slow!

You can pre-order my first zine drop and snag a free (8x10) print in the precess here.

-Clayton

2025 08 17

Skyline at sunset as seen from the Ike. Chicago, Illinois. May, 2025. © Clayton Hauck

It’s an always-elusive sight: the Chicago skyline as you’re driving back into town, the setting sun low on the horizon, bouncing light off the massive towers of glass and steel back into your direction. Lit up brilliantly, contrasted by the almost-night’s sky in the space beyond, the sight is elusive because managing to capture its brilliance in a photo is near impossible. For me, it’s more of a feeling I get at this time of day. People are on the move, going places and doing things. There’s an energy in the air. Aside from the traffic that comes along with it, it’s my favorite time of day to be in a big city.

While sitting on the couch recovering from Covid, youtube served me the video below and it brought a big smile to my face. As a hopeless cheerleader for the city of Chicago, it’s very cool to see creative young people doing all of the things I myself wish to do. If only I was a bit younger, I’d start a magazine. If only I had a bit more time on my hands, I’d get a creative agency going. I shouldn’t sell myself too short, I’m doing plenty of cool things (imo), but there’s a definitive feeling of being old and out of touch that often holds me back these days. Play to your strengths, I tell myself. Get started on that epic Sears Roebuck & Company biopic screenplay, I tell myself. Jokes?

-Clayton

2025 03 17

Somewhere in northern Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Back from a gig down in St Louis and a few days of Ill Wandering (lots of time on the road — need to prioritize less driving next time) and I’m catching up on life, getting back into the routine of things. This week, I aim to make my new website go live. More on that soon. I’m also preparing for a talk going down in two weeks time in which myself and fellow photographer/friend Jason Little will discuss how we use personal work in our practice. I feel like lately all I do is personal work, so I should have much to discuss. I’ll aim to make it worthwhile for both those in attendance and myself.

-Clayton

PS - on the topic of photography, this video by Noah Kalina hit my feed today and I really enjoyed it. Give it a watch, if interested.

2025 03 11

Somewhere in Northern Illinois. March, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Catching up on posts as I’ve been on the road and didn’t have time to make them as I was busy shooting and wandering. It’s interesting looking back at these images from last March as I’ve made quite a lot of progress and changes to how I want to approach this project moving forward. More on that later!

-Clayton

2025 01 03

The dust adds visual interest. Somewhere between Streator and Pontiac, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

This camera is so far gone but I continue to use it nonetheless. I tell myself I like the look the layer of dust is giving me. Honestly, I kind of do. Each time I go to buy a new one, they are not available. Everyone loves the Ricoh, apparently. Plus, spending a thousand bucks doesn’t sound very appealing right now. It’s probably time to attempt a surgery and see if I can’t remove some of this madness. If I fuck it up in the process, maybe it’ll get me to shoot more film again!

While researching the photographer Weegee (for no reason whatsoever!), I learned that he did a bunch of work with prisms later in his career. Interestingly, he did a series of images of Marilyn Monroe where her face is all distorted but you can still tell it’s her. It’s the kind of thing you might find profound in high school art class.

This is why I think I’m making groundbreaking work here with my Dirty-Sensor Ricoh. It’s profound and amazing. Maybe I will start to sell cameras that have dirty sensors to high school photography students!

Oh yeah, the creative resolution post is still in the works. Will get to it, eventually. Probably.

-Clayton

2025 01 01

Coming or going? Somewhere south of Rockford, Illinois. February, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Becoming a Daily Blogger in 2025

Today marks the successful completion of a full year of daily blogging!

Five days. Five, damn, days. At the time, I didn’t care that I missed posting to this here blog for five days because I was busy getting married. That clearly takes priority to casual blog posting, which goes almost completely unnoticed. Now, looking back from the comfort of a new calendar year, I see it as a failure of my objective! Perhaps because I live in the United States and we tend to see things as all or nothing. Perhaps because I don’t have my priorities in order. Perhaps because my standards are so high I consider it a complete failure to only get 98.6% of the way towards reaching my goal. Whatever the reason, when I noticed this five day gap (I’d completely forgotten about it because, you know, it doesn’t really matter) I was furious with myself. Why hadn’t I anticipated and pre-loaded blog posts? Should I now “punish” myself, start the timer over, and do it all over again this year?

Let’s be honest, I probably don’t need to be sharing any old thought I have on the internet anymore. That said, I’ve made it clear from day one that the entire point of this here blog is for me, myself, and I. I’m doing this to improve my own writing skills, photo editing skills, and to think through various subjects. The fact that I am doing it publicly is a byproduct and not the main motivator, but it’s also a way to keep me honest and put pressure on myself to continue to show up. It’s how my brain works. 

As an example, I was doing my “morning pages” quite regularly for months after reading The Artist’s Way. This was super helpful, however, as soon as I got busy with other shit (like getting married) I completely cut out this habit without even realizing I had done so. In a way, this here blog is my own version of the morning pages. It’s my version of therapy and it gives me a chance to think. Hopefully it does more good than harm when it comes to my reputation and people reading my business! 

One quick story about a proud moment that justified the time I’ve dedicated to this here blog: I lost a big job we bid on this fall. We lost it, but we almost won it! This may sound insane but I was almost as happy by how close we came to being awarded the project as I would’ve been had we actually been awarded the project. If you’re in the biz, you know about these calls you have with the client and/or agency leading up to bidding on a big project. On this specific call, it became very apparent to me that we had no realistic shot at winning this bid (for a number of reasons, but an obvious one was that all the examples they showed us were images they glowingly described as exactly what they wanted to capture — they were all made by another photographer, whom they’d just worked with, who was also bidding on the project!). My takeaway from the call was that if we had any shot at getting the job, I needed to write a really good treatment.

Either the treatment worked or things changed beyond our control because we got the call that we were favorites for the job. It was all but guaranteed! Then, as happens, things changed again and we didn’t get the job. But I took it as a nice consolation prize and largely credited my habit of writing regularly with being the thing that put us over the top. 

Most likely, in the new year I will tweak my approach a bit. My main priority is to continue the writing. Whatever approach best enables me to do this is how I will go about it. Again, there are days when I simply don’t have the time to jot down something worth reading, and those days probably don’t need a post. Maybe I’ll make it a “photo a day” situation so I can more easily fulfill my lifelong dream of posting to a blog every day for a year (sarcasm?), while keeping the words to days when I do have something more meaningful to share. We’ll see.

Thinking bigger, I often say you need to go to where the people are if you want to see noticeable success, and the people are not hanging out on blogs. If I really wanted to take this project to the next level, a YouTube channel would be the obvious next step. Learning to communicate in video form, versus textually, is a skill that will take you places in this day and age. The reality, however, is that I likely only have the time for a more casual blog, like this here one, that exists mostly as a space for personal growth and exploration. Regardless, I appreciate you being here!

Happy New Year!

-Clayton

This is one entry in a multi-part series of self-exploration and contemplation-out-loud in advance of the new calendar year. Some of this may happen; none of this may happen.
For the complete list of posts, see 2024 12 25.