Art Shay

'One of the Greatest' and 'Down to Earth' -- Focus on Art Shay

The good people at AmeriCollector.com have just published a full report on Art Shay, the man and his photos. It all started with a call to Florence Shay, at her antiquarian bookshop, Titles, Inc.

Here's an excerpt from AmeriCollector, where David Chesanow describes chatting with Florence on the phone about the author Nelson Algren, and when he learns Algren was a friend, he asks her last name:

“It’s Shay,” Florence said. “My husband is the photographer Art Shay.”

Those who believe in coincidence – and even those who don’t, and who are sure that all good things happen for a reason because cosmic forces are at work – can imagine my rare moment of speechlessness and delight!That’s because Art Shay – one of whose photos is on the dust jacket of the first edition of “A Walk on the Wild Side” – is one of the greatest photographers of the last century and this one as well. Even if you don’t know Art by name, you probably know photos he has taken: Jim Brosnan’s mitted hand extending from a vine-covered wall at Wrigley Field (like the Arthurian arm in the lake holding Excalibur) to make a catch; Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa blustering from a podium with his own giant image as the backdrop à la “Citizen Kane”; National Guardsmen poised in front of Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel (cheerfully emblazoned with “Welcome Democrats”) before confronting angry protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Eventually, Chesanow starts a correspondence with Art Shay, and declares: "I can attest to the fact that he is as 'real,' down-to-earth and captivating as the pictures he takes." 

Art Shay adds his own essay to the AmeriCollector package, including his thoughts on collectors:

One of the glories of selling to collectors is usually not having much of a clue to their likes ... This week I’m pulling up some prints of Life magazine photos of society ladies Hula Hooping on Michigan Avenue in the sixties, as well as some prints for a prominent legal firm in Chicago collecting Chicagoana. They like my picture of the first Mayor Richard Daley exultant on a grandstand in front of City Hall, celebrating the 1957 Chicago White Sox pennant with his young son, now mayor of Chicago himself.

For more from both Chesanow and Shay, click here.

Christopher Hiltz Shoots Art Shay

Christopher Hiltz has been posting photos on his blog, The Clementine Pile, and one recent collection shows some audience members from a Court Theater showing of Ibsen's The Wild Duck.

Click on this Clementine Pile link to see several of the images, including the fourth one, which shows Art Shay, in a knit hat.

What did Shay say to Hiltz?

From the blog:

I can't express enough how much I admire his work, and will follow his advice to 'just keep shooting' as if it were scripture.

Art and Florence Shay, Celebrating 30 Years Of North Shore Magazine

There was a party to celebrate North Shore Magazine's 30th anniversary and Art and Florence Shay added an extra dash of style to the gathering. Click here for a photo of the Shays at the party. Art Shay's photos and columns have been adding style and significance to the magazine since the start.

Art Shay In Swans On Movie Making And More

A film crew has been interviewing Art Shay and he wrote about their work and his memories of shooting movie stars (including Elizabeth Taylor, left) and more in this essay -- Rare Medium -- for Swans:

At first I was concerned about what the filmmakers will do to my book and Algren -- thinking what the hell, Algren died in 1981 and my nude picture of his lover, Simone de Beauvoir, wasn't a magazine cover until recently -- I now realize that I may be in the middle of a maelstrom. Who knows where cinematography will take my work in its quest for Fellini-like actuality?

Click to go to the Swans site.

Art Shay Exhibit At The MCA: Piercing, Perceptive

Joe Coussan has a summer internship in Chicago. Together with an intern from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sophie Williams, Coussan toured the Art Shay exhibit recently, and he recorded his impressions on his blog, Summer 2008. Living The Dream? You Bet:

Sophie guided us through the different exhibits, which included the patient and steady mobiles of Alexander Calder and the perceptive and piercing photographs of Chicago life captured by Art Shay.

Special Issue Of Swans, Featuring Art Shay

Peter Byrne has produced a special issue of Swans on the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Peter was also instrumental in having Art Shay, the preeminent American photojournalist of the past 60-plus years, contribute his recollection of these fateful days with the likes of Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, William Styron, Norman Mailer, etc., and generously allow us to publish some of his famous photographs. A retrospective of Shay's work was exhibited in Paris last month. Karen Moller went to its opening and sent us a report as well as pictures. Peter Byrne uses his literary brush to paint the historical tableau of the political machine in Chicago, the means used by Mayor Daley to orchestrate the police riots, and what happened at the Convention.

Click to read the Art Shay piece, in which he describes some of his work:

My best shot showed the wounded Genet, the indignant Ginsberg and Burroughs, and in one frame, Styron retching in the background. I wouldn't see Mailer for two days, and then in Grant Park, working the vasty crowd (including a revived Genet, Burroughs and Styron) waiting to speak. The police formed a single forward wall a few yards away to contain the audience. My wide angle picture of these chubby, hostile men with thick blue thighs made up the wrap-around cover of the best book that would be done on the police riot.

Art Shay: From Eiffel Tower To Tower Building

Art Shay was at the Elgin Authors Fair and he was the star of the show. From The Daily Herald:

But in the end, the local publisher scored a major coup by securing Art Shay, a man considered to be the last century's preeminent photojournalist, for the second Elgin Author's Fair, held Sunday.

Rawlinson, the fair's organizer, said it took a lot of "badgering" to get Shay to downtown Elgin. That's because the 86-year-old, who has pointed his camera at everyone from homeless Chicagoans to Marlon Brando and Simone de Beauvoir, knew he'd be tired after just coming off a trip to Paris.

Ultimately, though, Rawlinson said it was this analogy that helped seal the deal:

"I said, 'Well, Eiffel tower, Tower Building,'" Rawlinson said, referring to the tallest building in Elgin.

See Art Shay Sunday in Elgin

The Elgin Authors Fair is Sunday in Elgin, Ill., and Art Shay will be one of the authors at the literary event. Be there at the Elgin Public House, 219 E. Chicago Street.

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Here's a preview from The Courier News:

Also full of stories is writer and photographer Art Shay, now in his mid-80s and living in Deerfield.

As a freelance Chicago-based photographer, Shay shot images for Time, Life, Parade, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post and The New York Times Magazine.

"Art Shay is a living legend. It is so good it's beyond belief," Rawlinson said of the artist's work, particularly his autobiography Album for an Age: Unconventional Words and Pictures from the 20th Century.

Shay also wrote a play titled Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart? The actor was Shay's commanding officer during World War II.

'Poignant, Gritty, Witty, Sublime'

The Polly-Vous Francais blog has an insightful review of the Art Shay show in Paris:

A retrospective of Art Shay's photographs, "Traces of a bygone America," opened at the Galerie Albert Loeb in mid-April. I am brokenhearted to have missed the opening and especially sorry not to have met the talented Mr. Shay, 86, who was in town for a week for the event. But those who are in Paris between now and May 24 still have a chance to see his work. The photos in this show are remarkable. Poignant, gritty, witty, sublime, all in Chicago from the 1940s to the 1980s. A mix of celebrities (including Brando, Hemingway, Hefner, Mahalia Jackson, and Marcel Marceau, just to give a sample) and anonymous subjects, they express tenderness, humor, and daily urban life. The images are never complacent or banal: he captures the beauty of humanity in every shot.

Somehow Paris -- home of Ronis, Zucca, Doisneau, Brassai, Boubat et al -- is the perfect setting and juxtaposition for this exhibit.

Tragedy, Wit and Art Shay's Photos

In an essay titled Art Imitates Life, North Shore magazine compares Art Shay to many great novelists and sketches the contours of the Shay-Algren collaboration:

What Shay captured in this decade and a half is the city seen through Algren's eyes: the gamblers, the prostitutes, the junkies, the crooks, the disenfranchised. These photos chronicle the city's poor as Algren himself did in his writing, without guilt or pity. The camera, like Algren's pen, became an objective chronicler, telling the brutal stories of city life, but also the charm, the humor and irony. There are layers to Shay's photography. Take for example a photo he took of a blacktop leading to an alleyway, where the words "we hate black basters" are scrawled in dirty chalk. The caption reads: "racial hate and illiteracy often go together in Illinois." Shay and Algren's perspective is akin to Shakespeare's Falstaff; they all understand that tragedy and wit are blood cousins.

This isn't the first time North Shore has profiled Shay. From an earlier piece, Sure Shot Shay:

A deep-rooted sense of social justice and a poetic sense of common ground between all people anchor so many of Shay's shots covering civil rights, street life and homespun heroes. But visual one-liners are his stock in trade. In one photograph, a leopard pacing in its cage at the zoo and a woman walking by both sport matching "coats." Shay captured the same quips in photos of celebrities and politicians. He photographed the senior Mayor Daley peering out from between two neo-classical pillars like a god surveying earth from Mt. Olympus. Daley was, after all, "Boss," as newspaper columnist Mike Royko knighted him.