Art Shay

Welcome Democrats: Art Shay Remembers 1968

The most distilled and highest form of patriotism -- dissent -- reached an apotheosis on the streets of Chicago outside the 1968 Democratic convention. It's one thing to read the Bill of Rights -- it's another to assemble, to petition, and to freely give full voice to your views when confronted with armed officers of the state swinging clubs.

Four decades later, some memories of the violent confrontations between protesters and police are becoming cloudy. News reports of a recent gathering of former Chicago police officers included comments blaming the protesters: "bricks that were thrown at them, the heavy glass ashtrays dropped on them from hotel windows."

Art Shay, who was covering the convention and the protests, fired off a letter to The Sun-Times with his police riot recollection. He notes that no evidence ever turned up to support such claims. Here's an excerpt (the entire letter is reprinted after the jump):

I'm now 87, but my memory is clear -- and my pictures are clearer. I was covering for Time and Life magazines the calm faceoff between the hippies (whose ranks included many college teachers and delegates) and the police on Michigan Avenue just outside the Hilton Hotel. At twilight I took my position near the row of shop windows that fronted the Hilton's ground floor.

I was surrounded by agitated but peaceful demonstrators. Suddenly three bona fide cotton wagons rumbled north at the curb. (The wagons, we later learned, had been dispatched by Jesse Jackson to remind one and all about the oppression of black workers in the South.)

As soon as the two-mule wagons appeared, the crowd naturally had to give way and was pushed by the police onto the sidewalk and into the glass shop windows. The instant the police heard the glass break they went absolutely berserk, swinging their billy clubs.

One of Art Shay's 1968 convention photos is here, from outside the Hilton: "Welcome Democrats." A Shay daughter, Lauren Shay Lavin, was in Denver in 2008 shooting a more sedate Democratic convention. The angry Mayor Daley of 1968 had given way to the stolid Mayor Daley of 2008. The Chicago Public Radio blog published a post last summer capturing the generational arc of politics and photography.

Click for more from an Art Shay interview with Chicago Public Radio about the 1968 convention.

Dashing Earl Young, Classic Art Shay

The new issue of Sports Illustrated, page 77, in the section  called "On the Cover -- This Week in SI," reruns three covers they call memorable.

The first is the image here, a 1961 closeup color action portrait by Art Shay of the Olympian gold medalist Earl Young. At the time, Young was the "fastest quarter-miler alive."

Art, always a master of technical excellence, made his cover picture with a remote flash from a speeding station wagon.

Seaman On Shay: 'Striking Photography And Candid Reminiscences'

Donna Seaman brings her wit and wisdom to the radio with passionate discussion on Open Books Radio. Of course, Seaman has a blog, too, and she recently posted her take on Nelson Algren as the underratted champion of the underdog.

As with any analysis of the Algren years, Seaman touoched on the role of Art Shay as Algren pal, photographer and intellectual touchstone.

From Seaman's Open Books Radio post, Remembering a Chicago Writer:

Self-deprecating and ironic, an avid listener and a stalwart witness, Algren was of the underworld, yet separate from it. His balancing act is evocatively captured in Art Shay’s Chicago’s Nelson Algren (2007), a book of striking photographs and candid reminiscences. A buddy of Algren’s, Shay carried a concealed camera on their peregrinations and caught the writer, his brow speared by a widow’s peak, his eyes protected by glasses and bright with sadness, intently watching moments of mayhem, respectful and rueful. Algren stored it all up and wrote it all down in a feverish torrent of compassion and outrage, bemusement and sorrow.

Seaman also writes for the Chicago Tribune (see her review of The Plaque of Doves) and the Los Angeles Times (her review of My Name Is Will) among other publications. She is an associate editor for Booklist.

Algren In Amber: LATimes On Art Shay, Nelson Algren, And A Literary Legacy

Here is one more note on the Algren Live event at the Steppenwolf Theater, from David L. Ulin, the book editor of the Los Angeles Times. Click to read his essay, Nelson Algren's legacy ebbs. Here is an excerpt about the event and about Art Shay's photos:

Arranged in a line across the stage are nine chairs, in which sits an unlikely array of people, beginning with Simon and "Wild at Heart" author Barry Gifford, and featuring novelists Russell Banks and Don DeLillo and actor Willem Dafoe. Together, they're rehearsing a bit of reader's theater called "Nelson Algren Live," which will be performed this night before a packed house, including Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the National Book Foundation, and former Life magazine photographer Art Shay, who took the most iconic shots of the author, black-and-whites of him playing poker or peering through barroom windows, pictures so gritty you can almost feel the dirt rise off the frame.

These photos, as much as anything, are responsible for Algren's image as "the poet of the Chicago slums," yet they also cast him in amber: a midcentury figure, smoking a cigar, eyebrows raised behind round glasses, turning over another card. Sixty years after winning the first National Book Award, for his 1949 novel of addiction, "The Man With the Golden Arm," Algren has become vestigial enough that discussions of a national celebration were scaled back after, as Augenbraum notes in an e-mail, "we concluded that though his writing continued to resonate, the number of his readers and his currency among the general reading public had diminished."

So what, exactly, is Algren's legacy? That's the question the Steppenwolf event means to raise.

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"Algren," The Movie, Coming In 2010

Nelson Algren looked behind the billboards boasting of the American consumer ambition to find the disposesed and disconnected citizens with their own dreams, sleeping in the shadows.

Art Shay's photos of Algren make up a large part of this trailer for Michael Caplan's film "Algren," due from Montrose Pictures in 2010. Here's a link to the trailer for "Algren." There is Algren and Marcel Marceau, Algren and Eleanor Roosevelt, Algren and the streets of Chicago.

You can also see Art Shay, in an interview, remembering their time together and some of the street characters they met and captured in prose and photos.

There is also the voice of Studs Terkel on Algren the outsider and appreciative quotes from Carl Sandburg, Alex Kotlowitz and Ernest Hemingway, and of course, from Algren's lover, Simone de Beauvoir.

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 Photos In Algren Tribute

Art Shay showed highlights of his Algren works at a 100th birthday tribute night to the Chicago author. Below, in a photo by Richard Shay, is a sense of the event at the Steppenwolf. Matt Dillon had a calendar conflict, but other notables -- from Dafoe to Kogan to DeLillo -- more than made up for his absence.

The Algren Treasure, The Shay Salute

With one of the most important salutes to the Nelson Algren centennial set for Monday, The Chicago Tribune has just published a review of some posthumously published Algren work, Entrapment and Other Writings,  and a feature by Rick Kogan on some Algren memories. Here's Kogan on Art Shay:

There is no one alive who knew Algren and his work more intimately than photographer/writer Art Shay, whose steady parade of books gild his pal's legend at the same time that they provide firsthand insight. Many years ago Shay told me, "Nelson blew a lot of books that we should have had. But what he wrote is a treasure."

Can't argue that, on any score.

Algren was a gifted pro. Shay himself takes aim at the giftless amateurs in an essay for Swans.com, concluding with a call for a new reality show:

Here's a free suggestion for some network. A great big amateur hour for America's newly unemployed. Title: American Idle.

Another Art Shay Cover -- Nelson Algren, Chicago Reader

The Chicago Reader is publishing a short story by Nelson Algren. What could be more fitting than an Art Shay street shot of the author? Here's a detail from the cover. The new Reader is available at all the best street corners in Chicago.

Happy Birthday, Art!

Happy
Birthday,
Art!

Have a wonderful, happy
and healthy birthday.

and here's a link to how we celebrated
one year ago: birthday link.