At the turn of this century Rich Cahan led the massive yearlong photography project, Chicago in the Year 2000, or CITY 2000. Now the year 2000 recedes into history, in ways those thousands of pictures have begun to intimate. “They’re starting to get old enough to have that beautiful second dimension that only photographs can have,” Cahan says. “They’re just a tiny bit off. In ten years they’ll be a little more off.”
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“These were the absolute first years of journalistic photography,” says Cahan. He and his friend and collaborator Mark Jacob have just published a record of it, Chicago Under Glass: Early Photographs From the Chicago Daily News. The “glass” of the title refers to the glass negatives from which the pictures were made, negatives often marked up with the photographers’ notations of who was who, but never with the names of the photographers themselves.
Chicago Under Glass reproduces, side by side, the front pages of the Daily News when the big stories were the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903, the Eastland disaster of 1915, and the Saint Valentine Day’s Massacre of 1929. There were no pictures on the front pages that reported the first two calamities—even though the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River mere blocks from the Daily News offices and photographers quickly reached the scene. By 1929 the papers had finally caught on: five pictures ran in a cluster in the middle of page one, four head shots and a photo taken at the garage where Bugsy Moran’s gang was rubbed out.
The Daily News went under in 1978, long before it could have created its own online archive. So the writing in this famously literary paper is largely lost, but the photography survives, and now an anonymous photographer’s strange, wonderful picture of a group of blind children stroking a circus elephant deservedly finds a spotlight as the cover of Chicago Under Glass. It’s a fitting introduction to the book, expressing the idea of reaching out to touch something most alive in the imagination.v
