During his late 20s, while living in Chicago from 1988 to 1991, photographer Mark Steinmetz spent much of his time capturing images of everyday people in everyday situations. “I kind of think of myself as an archaeologist, but living in the time and just describing it,” says Steinmetz, 64, a former Guggenheim fellow who now resides in Athens, Georgia, and whose works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other institutions. “Most photography is about happy people, thumbs-up kind of things, or dramatic moments,” he notes. But he’s more interested in what he describes as “shades of boredom,” an emotion he thinks is “underdescribed in our culture.”
