Help save history in your community by identifying, exploring, and documenting significant places.

"I never knew that there were lions and griffins and brackets and pediments on main street buildings." —student quote

Eye Spy on the South Side

Take a walk along your neighborhood main street and photograph distinctive, main street building details. Print out those details, and glue them on a piece of paper in any order you want. Include a photograph of yourself in the scene, and add touches of artistry with markers, crayons, foil, wrapping paper, newspaper clippings, or words from magazines. Think about composition, color, and meaning as you compose your picture. The result: a main street collage, created in the style of African-American artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988).

South Side students create main street collages during a visit to the Silver Eye Center for Photography. The non-profit gallery is housed in a Victorian building on East Carson Street that has a jazzy façade from 1922. After walking around the block, solving riddles, and finding matches to photographic details, students return to the Silver Eye to compose a collage that tells the story of their walk. You'll see some examples below.

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