- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Roadside Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
ABOUT CHUCK STEFFEN
That's Chuck Steffen in the above photo, a recovering Catholic, still on his knees after all these years. It was taken by one of his three brothers (no sisters, sorry to say) in a parking lot around the corner from the assisted-living facility where their parents were coming down the home stretch of life, neck and neck. Their mother and father died shortly after this picture was snapped, within three weeks of each other and after 68 years of marriage.
Steffen was a professor of US history once upon a time. Now, he lives a quiet life as a state pensioner. Before retirement he spent forty years at Murray State University and Georgia State University, educating young minds and writing on a range of topics from labor politics in the early republic to the crises of homelessness and housing in whatever kind of republic we now live under.
Toward the end of his classroom days Steffen made an eye-opening discovery: a world that seemed to have lost its shine came to life in unexpected ways when he viewed it through the discipline of geography, the theories of Karl Marx and the lens of a camera. The website before you is Steffen's attempt to synthesize these three ways of knowing the world and the political economy that shapes it.
Parking Lot off Eagle Rock Boulevard, Eagle Rock, California. Photo by Dan Steffen