Art Shay: Chicago Accent
The Essential Art Shay: Selected Photographs
Art Shay’s story is a jam-packed American epic, a stew of history and chutzpah that would be hard to believe if he hadn’t snapped the evidence all along the way. Two exhibits opening this month, at Stephen Daiter gallery and the Chicago History Museum, bear witness to the photographer’s life and work. He went from the sidewalks of the Bronx, where he grew up, to wartime skies over Germany to Life magazine in its postwar heyday. During the 50-year career that followed–managed from a Deerfield split-level where he and his wife, rare book dealer Florence Shay, raised five children–he met and immortalized everyone from mobsters and movie stars to protesters and presidents. “At one point I was the go-to photographer, freelance, for Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times Magazine, Parade, Business Week, Forbes, and Saturday Evening Post,” Shay says. He reckons he’s published 25,000 images, of which 1,000 were covers.
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The child of Russian immigrants, Shay says he got his first lessons in both sex and photography at a summer camp where he’d landed a job as a bugler. He attended college for a few months, then enlisted in the air force and wound up a navigator in the 703rd Squadron; he flew two combat tours, including 30 bombing missions over Germany. In 1944 he caught a midair collision on film and scored his first publication: a six-image full-page spread in Look magazine. Three years later, on the strength of captions he’d written for his photos, Life hired him as a reporter. After working in New York and Washington, Shay was sent at age 25 to San Francisco as the magazine’s youngest bureau chief. He blew the job when he raised the curtain on a voting booth so a photographer could shoot vice presidential candidate Earl Warren making his selections. Warren charged out of the booth shouting about violation of privacy, and Shay got busted down to reporter at the Chicago bureau. He’s lived in the Chicago area ever since.
The tragedy of Shay’s life was the disappearance of his eldest son, presumed murdered, just shy of the boy’s 21st birthday in 1972: “We never even got a body.” Shay’s also weathered two heart surgeries, the most recent three years ago, an experience he documented for the New York Times. He still lives in the suburban split-level, up to his ears in uncataloged negatives and prints–a wilderness only now being tamed by an archivist. (His dealer, Daiter, says he discovered his favorite Shay photograph on a visit a few years ago when he stepped on it.) Shay still plays racquetball three times a week, and he’s hoping to finish and perform a one-man show about Algren. The Daiter exhibit (50 photographs and two catalogs) opens March 9; the Chicago History Museum show (140 images from the 1940s to 2002 plus artifacts, including two tiny cameras Shay used to spy on Mafia bosses and mall shoppers alike) on March 31. That’s also Shay’s 85th birthday.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Art Shay photo/Paul L. Merideth.
