Art Shay

Art Shay, Chicago’s Premier Photojournalist

Michael Weinstein visited the Stephen Daiter gallery for Newcity Art and filed a report recommending that readers see the exhibit of Art Shay photographs.

Excerpt, from Weinstein's review of the Art Shay exhibit:

Chicago’s premier photojournalist Art Shay captured a moment in place and time, here in the early 1950s, when the gritty old city still held on, with its bittersweet ironies and brutalities, its harshness, and its anticipations of technology-fueled urbanity.

Weinstein continues:

Shay could also show the seamiest sides—a man, again shot from behind, stands in the Maxwell Street police station, his back drenched in blood as the others go about their business. 

The Daiter Gallery show is so popular that it has been extended beyond the original closing date of Feb. 25 and is now open through March 10.

 

Art Shay True Colors: Poignancy, Brilliance and Wit

The Art Shay exhibit at the Thomas Masters gallery has been extended through February. The gallery owner, Thomas Masters, said it was a record crowd at the opening and that interest is continuing to grow as the word spreads. 

Ben Schuman Stoler had this to say in the Chicagoist:

. . not only are we shown five decades (!!) of Shay’s photographs, we’re presented with some of the most important moments of the 20th century, framed with all Shay’s poignancy and punny wit.

Whitney Stoepel added this in a review for Gapers Block:

The show is packed with recognizable faces like President Kennedy, Andy Warhol, Johnny Cash, Jimmy Hoffa, and a few wonderfully moving pictures of and about Martin Luther King, Jr. After the assassination of King, Shay talked his way into the building across from the hotel and snapped a photo of the murderer's handprint on the wall, highlighted by police fingerprint dust. It took my breath away.

Jeffery McNary for Chicago Art Magazine used the word "brilliant." Here's more:

Art Shay’s photography is brilliant. And should one be in search of art as solely objects of, and for, aesthetic enjoyment, the exhibition, “Art Shay’s True Colors”, opening Friday, January 15 at the Thomas Masters Gallery, is not that experience. It is not an imagined dream life. It is a collection, an exhibition of the works of a photographer who has managed to crystallize defining moments in the American experience in bright colors, without a bypass, on archive rag paper with digital print..

Michael Weinstein in Newcity Art was captivated by the color and composition:

Always vibrantly alive, Shay’s shots catch the dramatic instants of situations from their dramatic perspectives, as we see in “Burn, Baby Burn,” in which draft cards held aloft by protestors go up in flames in the steel-blue, smoky twilight. Known for his black-and-white images, this show exhibits only Shay’s color work, which is equally bold and insightful, proving that it is not the medium that counts but the eyes and the mind that deploy it.

Don't let the critics have all the fun. Make your way to Old Town and judge for yourself.

Compelling Visuals, Striking Coda

The Daily Herald weighs in with a look at the Lookingglass Theater's "Nelson Algren" production:

Speaking of compelling visuals, "For Keeps and a Single Day" is paired with MCA lobby exhibition of 19 works (some of which are featured in the production) by Chicago photographer Art Shay, an Algren friend and collaborator. It's a striking coda to a show that will echo long after its too-short run concludes.

Reviews From Paris: The Art Shay Photos

The critics are starting to publish their views of the Art Shay exhibit in Paris. From leJDD.fr:

L'objectif d'Art Shay se promène dans tous les replis du melting pot américain. Une écriture en noir et blanc, sans concession, analytique, parfois poétique, presque toujours ironique. Sous son oeil laser, on découvre le mime Marcel Marceau sans fard, pilier de bar ou jouant au billard, le fringant propriétaire du magazine de charme Playboy, Hugh Hefner, entouré de quatre playmates encore très sages ou la chanteuse Diana Ross dans sa loge avec les Supremes. Au fil des reportages, il s'en donne à coeur joie. "J'ai photographié des figures comme Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevi Singer, Hemingway, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Hoffa, Martin Luther King, tous les présidents des Etats-Unis depuis Hoover, des gangsters et des mafieux", égraine-t-il.

Translation (please add a better translation as a comment, below):

Art Shay walks travels in all areas of the American melting pot. Writing in black and white, without concession, analytical, sometimes poetic, almost always ironic. Through his laser eye, one discovers the mime Marcel Marceau unvarnished, a pillar of the bar or playing pool, the dashing owner of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner, surrounded by four playmates , or singer Diana Ross in her dressing room with the Supremes. In his descriptions, he gives heart to joy. "I photographed figures like Saul Bellow, Isaac Singer Bashevi, Hemingway, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Hoffa, Martin Luther King, all the presidents of USA since Hoover, gangsters and Mafia," he says.

And from Les Echoes:

Souvent, il s'est exposé physiquement pour capter des moments rares. Il dissimulait alors son appareil dans une valise. Plus que le regard ou le cadra- ge, chez Art Shay, comme chez les autres grands photographes, les images racontent plus que ce qu'el- les représentent.

which may mean:

Often, it took great physical effort to capture rare moments. He hid his camera in a suitcase. More than the eye, in the work of Art Shay, as for other major photographers, the images tell more than that they represent.

Media Spin, Lindsay Lohan and Art Shay

We don't often get Lindsay Lohan and Simone de Beauvoir into the same Art Shay blog post (in fact this is a first). The MediaSpin blog juxtaposes a New York magazine cover shot of Lohan and the Art Shay photo of de Beauvoir, which ran on a French magazine cover, to conclude: "if you've got it, flaunt it." MediaSpin did take a moment to view other Shay photos available from the Stephen Daiter Gallery, and added that he likes Shay's 1980’s photo of cartoonist Robert Crumb (below), too.

Magazines are a business, of course, and at New York or Le Nouvel Observateur, flaunting it means attention and sales. Forbes.com ran the numbers on the Lindsay Lohan photo:

According to New York's online rate card, the "super banner ad" of the type that appears on the Lohan photo slideshow has a CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) of $15. Multiply that by the number of views and the Lohan slideshow ads were valued at more than $500,000 over two days. NYmag.com probably charged far less than the rate-card rate, as is common in the industry.

No word from Paris on any similar calculation for Le Nouvel Observateur, but the attention (here, here, here and here, for example) must add a bounce to the step for that sales team, too.

"Daumier with a Leica"

Kevin Nance in The Chicago Sun-Times reviews "Chicago's Nelson Algren" (click on book cover in the upper left corner of this blog for the book):

One of Algren's main functions in these photographs is to serve as a guide -- playing Virgil to Shay's Dante, leading him deeper into the urban inferno. Chicago's Nelson Algren was originally titled Nelson Algren's Chicago, which was closer to the point. 

Art Shay's Chicago would have been even better. He starts off following Algren but ends up stalking the city itself. Shay is always scrambling for position here, looking for the odd detail that turns a humdrum documentary photograph into an image that burns into your memory. Sometimes it's in the density of the streetscape, in which multiple scenarios (drunkenness, poverty, commerce of all kinds) play out in close proximity; sometimes it's in brutal juxtapositions, like a crowd making much of a cute little dog while ignoring a man passed out on the sidewalk nearby.

And sometimes it's in the cheery mid-century ad lingo that often floats in the background, mocking. "NEED CASH?" blares a billboard over the shoulders of a pair of beggars on Madison Street; "WELCOME DEMOCRATS" hovers over bayoneted National Guard troops in 1968. To some, Shay's use of signage for satiric purposes in some of the photographs is a weakness. To my mind, it's part of Shay's special edge. (If it was good enough for Margaret Bourke-White -- whose picture of a breadline in front of a billboard trumpeting "World's Highest Standard of Living" remains one of the Depression's most indelible images -- it's good enough for Shay, and me, too.) One man's cheap irony is another man's genius.

When he took these photographs, after all, Shay was still young and brash, a Daumier with a Leica, avid for the visual zinger -- hence his gimlet eye, his refusal to make myths or extol the nobility of the common man.

The Stephen Daiter catalog for the Art Shay exhibit

Praise for Art Shay's photographs: "The work is journalistic but with a poetic edge. They could exist as journalistic documents or as art." -- from the blog 5B4 and an essay about the catalog published by the  Stephen Daiter Gallery in conjunction with the gallery's Art Shay exhibit.
Another excerpt:

Their most recent title is Art Shay: Chicago Accent. Shay was a writer for Life and Time magazines and would write text and captions for photographers like Alfred Eisenstaedt, Wallace Kirkland and Francis Miller. Around 1948, he moved to Chicago and started taking photographs full time. He often collaborated on projects with the writer Nelson Algren who was best known for his book The Man With the Golden Arm.

World class

A letter from a Chicago-area art collector to The Chicago Tribune in response to the Alan Artner review of the Art Shay exhibit at the Chicago History Museum. Click on the "Continue reading" button to read the whole letter:

Art Shay is Chicago’s only world class photo-journalist. Most critics other than Alan Artner have called Shay's current show at the Chicago History Museum  an esthetic triumph. Several have grouped his  street candids with those of the immortal Henri Cartier-Bresson’s.

As a collector of Shay’s works I think of him as our Michael Jordan of photography.
His  pictures hang in the National Portrait Gallery, in many collections, and in a growing number of museums and  galleries. Of course the appreciation of humor is subjective, but my wife, my friends and I think Shay's shot of a woman in a faux leopard coat exchanging glances with a real leopard at a Lincoln Park Zoo cage, is hilarious -- hardly the “one-liner” your critic abominates.

"The mastery of Art Shay"

Michael Weinstein writing in NewCity Chicago about the Chicago History Museum show: 'In this lavish exhibit impeccably curated by Leigh Moran, we get a chance to appreciate the mastery of Art Shay, the most important Chicago street, celebrity and performance photographer of the twentieth century, and a match for anyone else in the world. The 135 black-and-white images--accompanied by concise, punchy and informative captions--never fail to display Shay's virtuosity and together underscore his versatility and sensitivity to his subjects."
Click for another review of the show.

"Life in the raw"

New City Chicago reviewed the Daiter Gallery exhibit. Here's part of Michael Weinstein's description: "In Shay's blue-collar Chicago of yesteryear, there is not a fashion statement to be made and not a trace of posing; life in the raw is what Shay was after and this generous slice of his work shows that he succeeded better than he could have hoped; his images are cold blasts from a past that prolongs itself into the present beneath our glitzy veneer."
Click for a link to another review.