Art Shay

Shay Signs Chicago Photo Book At Algren Event

Richard Shay captured his father, Art Shay, signing books at the Steppenwolf Theater event honoring Nelson Algren. Shay's book, "Chicago's Nelson Algren," records in words and photos the long-time collaboration between the two and the street scenes that animated their work.

Click on the book cover in the upper left corner of this blog to purchase your own copy of "Chicago's Nelson Algren."

Art Shay, The Photographer And His Books

Art Shay's photographs have appeared on more than 1,000 magazine covers. He has also written scores of books. This stack of some selected Art Shay books makes a fitting prop for an Art Shay portrait.

Photographer photographing photographer with pillar of his prose, preserved in hard covers.

Top-of-the-stack honors go to Art Shay's recent books, with his memoir, "Album For An Age," as the crown.

To add to your own Art Shay library, click on any book cover in the top left corner of this blog.

'Chicago's Nelson Algren' Reviewed In Swans

The reviewer, Raju Peddada, is taken by Art Shay's insights and photos, and states that

a study of his photographs reveals to us the beauty, serendipitous compositions, immediacy, and the putative poignancy in his skill and vision; but if we peer hard, his work reveals to us an imperceptible palimpsest of his personal experiences that Shay bashfully stashes away from our sight, stuff that really shaped him and his craft.

Peddada, in this essay in Swans Commentary, says:

His photographs are our confessions of moments that we conveniently forgot; also, his pictures are mirrors that force us to see what we have become in our most trying circumstances.

Click to read the entire review.

'His Face Is Everywhere' -- Swans

Peter Byrne in Swans Commentary reviewed Art Shay's newest book, Chicago's Nelson Algren (see photo of book cover in top left corner of this blog). From the Byrne review:

Of course Shay respects the first rule of his profession and keeps out of the picture. But that doesn't mean he's invisible. His face is everywhere, like Paul Cezanne's on all those views of Mont Sainte Victoire or Damien Hirst's on his lumps of dead meat under glass. Forget Christopher Isherwood's neat, wrong-headed motto: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking." Art Shay is no comatose, submissive, gawking never-closed shutter. He obtained his first published photos by being on the qui vive, outwitting a superior officer and outthinking mechanical contrivances. Flying back to Britain in 1944 from a mission over Europe, Shay saw two bombers about to collide above him and had to fight off a rules-and-regulations fanatic to get his shots.

"The life of a vanished city at street level"

The Reader's book review by Martha Bayne captures the power of "Chicago's Nelson Algren" (see book cover in top left corner of this blog):

So perhaps the greatest virtue of Chicago’s Nelson Algren, Art Shay’s new collection of photos of our poet of the slums in his natural habitat, is that for once the images get to do the talking. Starting in 1949 and shot over more than a decade, the pictures—many taken with a hidden camera—were originally intended for a Life magazine photo essay on Algren that never saw the light of day. Candid black and whites capture the life of a vanished city at street level: down-and-out vets slump on a skid row curb; a drug deal goes down in a Division Street doorway.

and

There are intimate shots of the writer at home with his cat, each hunched over his respective bowl. The most intimate of all is actually not of Algren but of his beloved “Frenchy,” Simone de Beauvoir, whom he romanced from his Wabansia Street walk-up and whom Shay captured on film in bare-assed glory, fixing her hair in the bathroom mirror wearing nothing but a pair of mules.

Meet Art Shay on Wednesday, Dec. 5

If you missed Art signing books Nov. 29 at Titles, Inc., in Highland Park, come to The Hideout, on Wabansia, in Algren's old neighborhood:

Renowned photographer Art Shay will sign copies of his latest book of photographs "Chicago's Nelson Algren," at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 5 at Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia Ave., Chicago. The event also features a photo presentation and a party. Free and open to the public. (773) 227-4433.

Click for a map showing Hideout and the neighborhood.

To edit is to choose

The Editor's Choice, and the editor is Elizabeth Taylor, literary editor of The Chicago Tribune:

Chicago's Nelson Algren

Photos and text by Art Shay Seven Stories, 167 pages, $19.95 paper

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for the spirited collaboration of Chicago's writers and photographers. Artists rub shoulders in this city in a unique way, and that relationship is expressed in this lovely book. Nelson Algren met Art Shay in 1949 and introduced him to the world of Division Street: boxing ring, Rialto Burlesque Theatre, beauty parlor and so on. Dreary street scenes are made vivid by nameless characters; there are a few classic shots of Algren: on his bicycle, at his typewriter, by a pool table. And there are shots of Algren's lover, Simone de Beauvoir: at Stuart Brent's bookstore and, astonishingly, fresh out of a bathtub.

See top left corner of this blog for the book cover, and a link to Amazon.

"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.

Viewing Chicago, the writer's way

Tom McNamee at The Sun-Times has produced an eloquent essay on one Art Shay photo (top left corner of this blog, on the book cover), on the role of the writer, and on the lifeblood of a city:

If I had to pick one photograph that captures how I see Chicago, how I feel the city, this would be it. On an average day, I might tell myself Chicago is a pretty postcard of the lakefront. But on an exceptional day, I know this photo is the true face of Chicago, the town that taught me how to revel in a world falling apart.

'Algren in his milieu'

The photo was taken at Halsted and Madison streets by the superb photographer Art Shay in the winter of '49, around the time Algren won the very first National Book Award for his novel The Man With the Golden Arm. Shay was doing a photo spread on Algren to pitch to Life magazine.

I first saw the photo in a book by Shay published in 1988. Now it's the cover of a new book by Shay, Chicago's Nelson Algren, put out by Seven Stories Press.

"It shows Algren in his milieu," Shay told me last week when I asked him why he chose this shot for the cover. "Imagine having pictures of Dostoevsky at work, or Tolstoy on his farm or Hemingway in Italy."

Tribute to the Pacific Garden Mission

The Schadenfreude blog notes the end of the Pacific Garden Mission on State Street, with a nod to an Art Shay photo in his newest book:

Hats off to the Sun-Times for getting a good shot of the final moments of the Pacific Garden Mission on State street. When I worked in the coffee shop at Columbia College about 12 years ago, I used to take the stale bagels and muffins over to the mission before I hopped on the red line. When I saw the mission was being moved, I wondered about the obvious history. Yesterday I was sent the new book of photos (old photos) "Chicago's Nelson Algren" which was put together by Chicago legendary photographer Art Shay. Randomly I flipped through it and the page landed on a photo of Algren, hanging out at the Pacific Garden Mission on State street. What a coincidence, what a message.

Keith Hale of The Sun-Times captured the image of the sign being moved:

The South Loop lost one of its most prominent landmarks today when workers removed the massive white cross outside the Pacific Garden Mission at State and Balbo.

For more than 50 years, the 15- by 10-foot cross declared “Jesus Saves” in red neon from the front of the shelter’s four-story red brick building.

Update From page 48 of "Chicago's Nelson Algren":

The best free food and showers in Chicago was -- and still is -- served at the vernerable Pacific Garden Mission on south State Street. "It ain't too bad," Nelson said, "if you feel guilty anyway and don't start wonderin' who asked Jesus to die for your sins."