Art Shay

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: His Life, His Death

Art Shay was there when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago in 1966, bringing his crusade for racial justice to a northern city where segregation in housing, education and employment mirrored conditions in the South.

Art Shay was the photographer who captured an image for Life magazine of a young black couple moving into an otherwise all-white Chicago neighborhood. Chicagoist reprinted the image and other Shay images of the King era in a King Day remembrance: From the Vault of Art Shay: Remembering Dr. King.

Art Shay was also there at King's funeral. Assigned to Memphis immediately after the assassination, Shay wrote recently (Remembering Dr. King's Death) about being with Gary Wills. Shay and Wills

went to the funeral home preparing King's body for burial. It was eerie, for all the radio stations were playing his speeches endlessly, listening to his voice while we could hear the sounds of the funeral face-restorers frantically working to make his half-shot-away face look presentable for his open casket showing. The next day I rode the back of the big open truck as Mrs. King and her family walked in the first row of a hundred-wide, two-hundred-deep funeral procession.

It was a moment from King's life, from his journey to Chicago, that carried the deepest reverberations for one family. A Shay photograph from that time was on display in a window of the Thomas Masters Gallery. It showed King and nearby a police officer named Barry Batson.

Batson's wife, Helen, remembers that time: "The word in the streets was that somebody would try to kill Dr. King in Chicago. My husband said 'It's not going to happen on my watch.' "

King then was 37 years old, determined that his dedication to civil rights, which had already earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, could expand from its southern base to find even more success in cities in the north.

Art Shay, a prolific photographer for Time and Life magazine, captured an image of King at a July rally in Soldier Field in Chicago. To King's right is a tall, thin officer, in fedora and suit: Barry Batson.

As recalled in Preacher, Photographer, Policeman, by chance Batson's daughter in law saw that photo in the gallery window, decades after the rally. That moment brought the Batson family together to honor the memory of the civil rights leader and the memory of that brave officer who made sure that, on his watch, Dr. King would remain safe.

This Is Now: Art Shay Starts 2011 Looking Back, and Ahead

Museums, collectors and galleries treasure prints from Art Shay's seven decades of making memorable images. Joan Brunwasser of OpEd News caught up with the peripatetic photographer recently and asked how it all started. Here's is Shay's response, from Art Shay: That Was Then, Part One:

In 1939, the year I was 17, I noticed that the windows of shops on downtown 57th Street were lit by then-new neon lamps. I lugged my $5 tripod downtown at night and began making Graflex time exposures of displays. My first and best sale was to the Hammond Organ Company. They bought five at $5 each and began sending me to churches, where I photographed Hammond organs.

From those church visits, it was a short step to navigating B-24 over Europe in World War II and then to Life magazine. 

After the war and stops in Washington and San Francisco, Shay and his family settled in this house in the Chicago suburbs (backyard Hula Hoop photo by Art Shay). Top names, big events and high-profile photo assignments dominated his schedule. A driving curiosity and a powerful sense of the moment dominated his work. Brunwasser, in Art Shay: That Was Then, Part Two, asked Shay to describe how he worked. Shay's response:

My eye was ever the hunter in employ of my mission. Good example: my early Time picture of Sen. McCarthy at the Stockyards Inn. I "covered" his speech - but also got a great image of him juxtaposed with a circular ceiling lamp - giving him an unearned halo, underlying how little fit he was to wear one. Most of my pictures were taken in off moments of great event assignments.

Another example was published this week by Shay on the Chicagoist. It was 1960 and Elizabeth Taylor was in Chicago to promote a movie. In this installment of From the Vault of Art Shay, the photographer describes Taylor as "otherworldly gorgeous in her purple-eyed, curvaceous prime" and goes on to describe the time a few weeks later they shared a TWA flight and Taylor fell asleep on his shoulder.

Shay is hard at work on his next Chicagoist column. For all the time spent looking back, it's always been the next project that has attracted his focus and enthusiasm.