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Nelson Algren Pauses after Another White Sox Loss, Chicago

A work made of gelatin silver print.
© Art Shay

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  • A work made of gelatin silver print.

Date:

1950

Artist:

Art Shay
American, 1922-2018

About this artwork

Art Shay is one of Chicago’s great photojournalists. With more than 25,000 published photographs—including more than 1,000 magazine covers—Shay has shaped the way we see the world on the printed page.

Born in the Bronx, Shay took up photography at the age of 12. He served in the U.S. Air Force in World War II, and his first published photographs—of an American military air disaster—were printed in a September 1944 issue of the weekly magazine Look. After the war, he joined Time and Life magazines, writing stories that he occasionally supplemented with his own (uncredited) images. In 1948 he moved to Chicago and took up photography full-time. In the nearly seven decades since, Shay’s camera has documented the famous and the downtrodden, the international and the local, the newsworthy and the intimate.

Of particular significance in Shay’s career was his long friendship with the writer Nelson Algren (American, 1909–1981); the two met in 1949 and collaborated on several books and other projects. Together Shay and Algren roamed Chicago’s neighborhoods to document the lives and culture of the city’s down-and-out, and the photographer’s many pictures of the writer on those forays combine to form a multifaceted portrait.
— Permanent collection label

“A lifelong White Sox fan, Algren suffered through their misfortunes as nervously as any Cub fan of our own age. As a kid he had lived through the Black Sox scandal and knew the details well enough to write authoritatively about it. Once he and Studs Terkel were passengers in my 1949 Pontiac. I can still hear them groaning about “The Swede,” an unlikely culprit, and the verbal fencing over the batting averages of the Black Sox and their fates. Studs would eventually script and appear in the definitive Black Sox scandal movie: Eight Men Out. It became Algren’s pleasure to take Simone de Beauvoir to ball games. He was charmed by her fixation on the way ballplayers scratched their genitals and by their body language in general. He especially loved her misreading the score as “114,000,523 to 026,000,112.”’
—Art Shay

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Photography and Media

Artist

Art Shay

Title

Nelson Algren Pauses after Another White Sox Loss, Chicago

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1950

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Inscriptions

Unmarked recto; signed verso, lower right, in black ink: "Art Shay"; inscribed verso, lower right, in graphite: "265.466.3.06"

Dimensions

33.1 × 25.7 cm (13 1/16 × 10 1/8 in.)

Credit Line

Ernest Kahn and William Elfenbaum endowment funds

Reference Number

2007.243

Copyright

© Art Shay

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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