View from the Ground is the online publication for the Invisible Institute, a non-profit journalism organization based in the South Side of Chicago. VFTG documents our work in progress and ongoing questions of inquiry in our human rights reporting.
Volume I
View from the Ground Vol. I was produced from 2001–2007 by Chicago journalist Jamie Kalven, photographer Patricia Evans, and technologist David Eads. Publishing from an office in a vacant unit at the Stateway Gardens public housing development, it was conceived as a human rights monitoring strategy: a vehicle for documenting conditions of life in abandoned communities.
Upon launching View, Kalven noted in passing, with tongue in cheek, that it was published under the auspices of the Invisible Institute. Today the wisecrack has become reality: the Invisible Institute is a robust journalism production organization operating out of the Experimental Station on the South Side of Chicago.
During his years of immersion in high-rise public housing, Kalven sought to facilitate the work of other journalists – as source, fixer, colleague – in an effort to improve the quality of public discourse. (In 2002, On The Media reported on this aspect of his work.)
2001-2007
Volume II
In 2015, the Invisible Institute incorporated into a 501(c)3 following the court decision in Kalven v. Chicago (2014), which established that police misconduct records are public in Illinois. The organization grew from a loose network of collaborators into an organization with staff, in order to create a police misconduct data tool that makes Chicago Police data accessible to the public.
In the aftermath of the murder of Laquan McDonald, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated the Chicago Police Department, sparking a series of reform efforts across Chicago.
The View from the Ground rebooted, as a means to keep the network of Invisible Institute collaborators informed about the police reform processes engulfing the City of Chicago.
The weekly newsletter by Curtis Black and edited by Darryl Holliday served as “Chicago’s Criminal Justice Playbook,” featuring a roundup of reporting on police reform developments central to the work of the Invisible Institute.
2016-2019
Volume III
View from the Ground now exists as a monthly roundup of developments, work in progress, and reflections from staff on the analysis behind our work.
2020-present
“We began the adventure that became the Invisible Institute with the conviction that victims of structural violence possess essential knowledge. They know things the rest of the society is organized and mobilized not to know. Our ‘beat’ thus necessarily came to include not only the view from the ground but also the willed ignorance—or, as James Baldwin puts it, ‘innocence’—that resists acknowledging that view.”
— Jamie Kalven
Photo Archive
Alongside all of the reporting from Stateway Gardens in the original The View from the Ground newsletter was a robust collection of black and white film photographs by Patricia Evans.
Presented here as a public collection for the first time are 80 scans of the original prints made by Evans in 1994-2007.
Please contact media@invisibleinstitute.com for commercial and non-commercial use of the photographs.