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.
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