Chris Verene has been documenting family and friends in his hometown of Galesburg, Illinois, since 1984, when he was sixteen years old. A recent exhibition presented forty-four images shot between 1987 and 2006. The idea of an artist creating an extended photographic series about the people and places that surround him is nothing new. We’ve been looking at shots of Nan Goldin’s adopted demimonde and Tina Barney’s well-to-do family for years. But novelty is not what makes Verene’s project worth viewing, nor should it be. On the contrary, his photographs hum with familiarity and constancy, as

The UP—Michigan’s upper peninsula—is about as topographically dramatic as the Midwest gets. Once the site of extensive copper and iron mines, the UP is now kept afloat largely by tourism and recre- ation. Wedged between Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, it is the site of brutal winters, the target of some of the most severe weather in the continental US. In the summer, though, it’s a sylvan wonderland, with large national forests and hundreds of miles of vacant beaches. Chicago artist Amy Vogel has summered on the UP for the past couple of years, and in her recent exhibition she engaged in