In the summer of 2007 Dave Mata spotted a crate of records outside a warehouse in Wicker Park. Mata, a musician and soul DJ, asked the workers inside if he could buy the vinyl, and also asked about work. He wound up with three crates of records and a job helping to clear out the packed space.
“Then it all got too weird,” Mata says. “I realized this was all probably part of a collection. If I had lost my songs, records, equipment, I would have nothing to show for myself as an artist. And it seemed that that had happened to someone else.”
“The exhibit was Howard’s brainchild,” Black says. “He realized it was a historical situation. . . . He spearheaded everything, from the printing to the funding.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The warehouse stash also contained some of Simmons’s later commercial work: head shots of John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony; a proof sheet of Michael Jordan pictures taken for a 1987 Coca-Cola campaign; a picture of Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, as it appeared in a print ad for a 1985 Channel Five retrospective on his murder; young Channel Five reporters Warner Saunders and Mark Giangreco posing with some of the ’84 Cubs at Wrigley Field.
In 1962, after high school, Simmons enlisted in the air force and spent the next four years playing the French horn in service bands. During his hitch in the military he was bitten by the photography bug. He bought an Asahi Pentax SLR in the Philippines, read up, and began shooting arrangements he made in the barracks of Gillette razors and bottles of Aqua Velva aftershave. “I would try to make simulated ads. It was very primitive—I was just learning,” Simmons says. “There was something about spending time assembling an image as opposed to spontaneously capturing it.”
Simmons covered Martin Luther King’s funeral in Atlanta in 1968 and a few weeks later photographed his somber widow, Coretta Scott King, at a rally in D.C. That portrait, featured in “Through Eyes of Blackness,” was lost to Simmons until Mata came across it in the warehouse.
Simmons compares the news photographer to a gunslinger in the old west: “A gunslinger can’t pull out his gun and aim—it’s gotta be automatic. Your camera and your exposure and composition—it all has to be automatic. Before being at the paper, I didn’t think of photojournalists being as bad as they are—bad, of course, being good.”
