I have been working as a professional photographer for almost 20 years. After graduating from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in photojournalism, I went to work for a small suburban weekly newspaper. My first major assignment was photographing Princess Diana?s visit to Chicago in 1996.

Other stops in my career included the Daily Herald and the City 2000 project, a yearlong photo documentary of Chicago. My contribution to the project was shooting the Gage Park neighborhood on the cit...