Big cities can sometimes seem like immense visual abstractions.The jam-packed juxtapositions of diverse styles of architecture — all compressed into dense overlapping vertical spaces — can be seen as things of rare man-made beauty.
These soaring glass-walled environments also invite a sometimes perverse delight in voyeurism. Michael Wolf’s new photobook, The Transparent City, captures both of these aspects nearly perfectly in his recent photographic study of downtown Chicago.