No-Type Magazine - Issue No. 01 | “Oh! Chicago!”

Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago imagined a utopian metropolis: efficient, beautiful, harmonious, and accessible to all. Grand boulevards, sweeping lakefront parks, and integrated green space still echo that ambitious vision. Yet today, the shimmering facades of glass and steel serve as both beacons of progress and cold monuments to capitalism and exclusion.

The Chicago that exists now reveals the tension between ideal and reality: a city of grandeur and grit, privilege and inequity, bold design and quiet disillusionment. Towering skylines impose anonymity; winding neighborhood streets offer intimacy and resilience. This city simultaneously welcomes and estranges.

For our inaugural issue, No-Type Magazine invites lens-based artists and photographers to investigate this complex landscape. We seek work that reflects the emotional and psychological experience of navigating Chicago—its beauty, banality, contradictions, and forgotten corners.

All photographic genres are welcome: street, documentary, conceptual, architectural, portraiture, experimental, archival, or hybrid forms. We want images that challenge, complicate, and illuminate the visual language of Chicago.