The Isolated Building Studies are the visual confluence of David Schalliol’s interests in urban dynamism, socioeconomic inequality, and photography. By using uniform composition in photographs of Chicago buildings with no neighboring structures, he hopes to draw attention to new ways of seeing the common impact of divergent investment processes on urban communities.
Isolated buildings are particularly useful for the exploration of neighborhood transformation and its social correlates because they are immediately recognized as unusual. As urban buildings, their form illustrates their connection with adjacent structures: vertical, boxy, an architecture confined by palpably limited parcels. When their neighboring buildings are missing, a tension emerges: the urban form clashes with the seemingly suburban, even rural, setting. Thoughtfully engaging the landscape requires further investigation to resolve this tension: Why is this building isolated? It is from this fundamental friction that the Isolated Building Studies launches.
“David Schalliol’s photographs of isolated structures are deeply resonant for both the information that they contain and for their striking visual quality. This is important and richly poetic work.”
—Dawoud Bey, MacArthur Fellow and Photographer
Absence, curated by sociologists Laura Harris and Maike Pötschulat, is a new group exhibition presented by Open Eye Gallery that brings together the photography of seven visual sociologists.
Taking place from June 5 to July 11, 2026, at Liverpool’s Stable Gallery, St George’s Hall, the show explores absence as both a social reality and a visual language. Across more than 100 photographs, the show investigates absence’s many forms, asking: What does it mean to document what is no longer there, or those who are no longer present? How can we see what society leaves behind, or what never came to be? How can we photograph what resists to be shown?
The exhibition includes work by Terence Heng, Setareh Kazem, Manal Massalha, David Schalliol, Paweł Starzec, Gesche Würfel, and Kyler Zeleny.
The sold-out opening event for Absence will take place on June 5, 2026 at 6 p.m. at Stable Gallery, St George’s Hall, St George’s Place, Liverpool L1 1JJ.
On Saturday, June 6, at 5 p.m. there will be a panel discussion at Open Eye Gallery to accompany the launch of Absence.
A limited number of copies of Isolated Building Studies will be available at Stable Gallery. In the late summer / early fall MAS Context will have copies available via our shop.
Isolated Building Studies has been designed by Renata Graw and Lucas Reif of the Chicago-based graphic design practice Normal with Iker Gil of MAS Context.
The book includes texts by David Schalliol and Karen Irvine, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.
It has been printed at Printer Trento, a printing house located in Trento, Italy. Operating since 1980, Printer Trento is now a well-known and respected company with 150 people working in the printing plant in Trento and at their bindery in Aldeno.
Book Details
Total Run: 700 copies
Paper: GardaPat 13 BIANKA
Typeset in: Century Schoolbook and ABC ROM
Pages: 80 pages
Size: 10.73 inches x 7.38 inches
ISBN: 978-1-7367436-6-9
Photography: David Schalliol
Texts: David Schalliol and Karen Irvine
Design: Normal (Renata Graw and Lucas Reif) and MAS Context (Iker Gil)
Printing and Binding: Printer Trento S.p.A., Italy