The following text is based on two conversations between artist Mikki Ferrill and curator Michal Raz-Russo that took place at the artist’s home in Oakland, California, on January 24, 2017, and February 11, 2019. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Michal Raz-Russo: You have spent decades photographing the people and events around you, in your own community. How did you first encounter photography, and how did the camera become your chosen creative tool?

Mikki Ferrill: I was attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago [SAIC] majoring in design, searching for my artistic niche. At some point I encountered a photograph by Ted Williams. It was a simple picture, but it was beautiful, and I’ll never forget it. It was a black-and-white image, a pair of women’s legs in high heels, backlit, a silhouette. In between the heels on the floor was a rose. It was the way it was composed and lit that made me realize photography is not just a documentary tool, it is a great art form. I had never looked at it in that way. I had learned about photography by looking at Life and Look and the other leading magazines that used it as a documentary tool. I never understood it as an art form until I saw that picture. It was an awesome picture. 

Raz-Russo: That encounter led you to an apprenticeship with Ted, setting you on a path to becoming a photographer.

Ferrill: I met Ted through his wife, Carol Williams, who was a friend of mine. I saw that photograph by Ted at their house. At the time I was taking several classes at SAIC—interior decorating, design, painting, and so on. I didn’t have the knack for those skills. I was horrible at perspective—I struggled with drawing in perspective—but photography worked for me. The camera made sense. I could capture perspective without drawing it.

I then became a regular at Ted’s studio, which was located at 441 North Clark Street. I hung out there every spare moment with Ted, Tom Jackson, and Jim Taylor. I also took classes Ted taught at his studio—Roy Lewis took them, too. The classes focused on the technical aspects of photography, but they were also about creativity. Ted was a little bit of a rebel, so he was really cool with me being a woman, and there weren’t a lot of women doing photography at that time. Ted was like a big brother to me. We were friends, we photographed together, we went to Maxwell Street in the freezing cold to take pictures. We traveled, even hitchhiked together. We were driving to Veracruz in Mexico to shoot Carnival in an old Rambler and the car broke down, so we left it with a mechanic and hitchhiked there. Ted was the one who recommended that I submit photographs to The Black Photographers Annual.^[1]

I met a friend of Ted’s named Joe Cook, who printed photographs. I learned from him that printing was a lucrative field, and I started printing myself. I learned so much from the guys who were around then, who took the time to teach me about various formats and printing techniques. It was a wonderful experience.

Once the semester was over at SAIC, I didn’t go back. I was into photography. I spent every waking moment that I wasn’t working in the studio learning more about printing. It was quite a learning curve because in school I wasn’t good at chemistry, and here I am loving photography and I’ve got to deal with chemistry. I always say the reason I had to learn to be a good printer was because I didn’t have good negatives. I got so good at printing that I began making exhibition prints for artists like Jim Taylor and others. I love to print.

In the 1970s I worked for Astra Photo Service, which was one of the first custom photo labs in Chicago. I had the night shift, which was 5:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Me and the guys who worked there listened to talk radio and talked politics. I used to encourage them to stop printing and follow their dreams, and they did. I was following mine by printing photographs. Those guys were the best. They and so many other people encouraged and helped me—I didn’t get any grants or financial support, but the ordinary people who helped me made up for it. People gave me cameras, film, technical tips, and so on. So many people supported what I was doing.

Raz-Russo: Your passion for photography led you to Mexico, where you lived and worked for several years before returning to Chicago.

Ferrill: Ted, Carol, and I moved to Mexico in 1967. Ted and I both got assignments from Sigma News Agency—we covered the 1968 Olympics. It wasn’t steady work, so Ted went into advertising photography with a Mexican photographer who had a studio on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, and I was Ted’s assistant. I worked a photography job here and there over three years. I didn’t speak fluent Spanish, and not a lot of people spoke English, so I had to become more intuitive about what I was shooting. I think that’s where I picked up a lot of it—my intuitiveness was there all along, but it was perfected in Mexico.

I didn’t want to come back to the United States, but I just couldn’t make enough money as a foreign correspondent. I would come back to Chicago every summer for the 57th Street Art Fair and sell jewelry I made while in Mexico. The money made from selling jewelry would last about six months in Mexico. It was worth the drive and I got to see my family. I licensed a picture I took of the Blackstone Rangers [a Woodlawn-based street gang] to the Standard Oil Company for an ad. Those things would provide enough money to sustain me in Mexico, because it was difficult to make a living working as a photographer. In 1970 I finally had to come back to Chicago, and I stayed there until November 1979.

Raz-Russo: In 1970, the year you returned to Chicago, you started attending the jazz battles and gatherings at The Garage, which was also known as The Alley, and taking pictures there regularly until 1979, the year you left Chicago for the West Coast. You became known there as the “Picture-Taking Lady.”

Ferrill: I didn’t consciously choose to photograph my neighborhood. That’s just where I was and photography was my passion. The Garage was someplace I went and loved. Skipper Jones was a DJ there, and I knew his aunt. He told me, “Mikki, you like jazz, come on down, I’m playing at The Garage.” That was the beginning.

At The Garage your head would be full of jazz. During the DJ battles, the DJs played exquisite music, so loud and crisp. It had to be vinyl. If the record had a scratch, it was a disqualification. If you miscued it—and they cued it by hand—it was a disqualification. I have pictures of them looking at the tracks—they had those kinds of rules that made it special.

The music in The Garage, until the time I left, never changed. It was always authentic, good jazz—big band, Count Basie, Duke Ellington. They also played R&B for two hours: Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and others. The younger kids would come and spend those two hours. Those kids weren’t interested in jazz, but they were interested in Marvin Gaye.

I love jazz, and at The Garage it was loud. I have a hearing deficit, so the volume was a plus. I just loved it. I didn’t go every Sunday, but I went a lot. When I did go, I always brought copies of the photographs I had taken and gave them to the people I had photographed and to Arthur “Pops” Simpson, the owner. They just started saying, “Here’s the ‘Picture-Taking Lady.’” It was a fabulous place and I really enjoyed it. I guess my pictures reflect that.

Raz-Russo: You were also a part of it, not just an observer. In a 1982 interview with Obscura magazine, Carrie Mae Weems cites you and Billy Abernathy [Fundi] as examples of photographers whose work provides the viewer with “no sense of separation from the people photographed, but rather one of being enmeshed in the subject’s lives, not speaking about them from a distance, but from the inside out.” 

Ferrill: I don’t know if there’s any set method to doing that. Ted used to say, “You always have to try to identify with your subject.” Maybe it’s a smile, or saying “I like your shirt.” Trying, even for that second, to form a relationship. When I first started taking pictures, I used to take everything with my 105mm lens from afar—to catch people off guard. I still do that sometimes, but more often I just step right up in it. I always have the utmost respect for my subject. I think that ultimately humility is the order of the day when photographing people.

When I started giving the people who came to The Garage their pictures, they really accepted and embraced me. I remember one guy whose wife had a birthday party in the little tavern around the corner where people went after The Garage, and he asked me to photograph that. There wasn’t any money exchanged. It was about them embracing me and my work. I never knew a lot of people’s names, like “Slim” [the man in the white suit and hat who appears in several photographs]. I just named him that. I never knew his actual name. It wasn’t a place where you go in and start asking people’s names.

In 1973 Bobby Sengstacke approached me with the opportunity to supply the Chicago Defender with a photo essay each week. I could photograph any subject I chose. I decided one of those essays should feature the photographs from The Garage. I hesitated because I feared it would change who came and the atmosphere there. The reason I decided to have it published is because it was a fantastic place where Black people came and communicated, and I thought it was made for the Defender. After the article was published, I felt the mood changed a little. People suddenly considered it a place to be, whereas before it wasn’t a place to be—it was someplace you wanted to be. I recognized that that would happen when the Defender article was published, but I felt it had to be put out there. I hesitated, but it was a no-brainer.

Raz-Russo: Bobby was responsible for bringing a lot of photographers together, hosting gatherings at his house with Roy DeCarava and so on. You and Bobby also collaborated on exhibitions.

Ferrill: We did the Black Esthetics [later known as Black Creativity] exhibition together at the Museum of Science and Industry in 1972/74. Bobby issued a call for photographers to submit their work. I curated the photography section, and Bobby, Onikwa Bill Wallace, and I installed it. We only had one night to install it. We were walking out as the press was entering. There were maybe two hundred to three hundred prints, and Bobby helped us get some of them printed oversized. It was one of the first big exhibitions of African American photography in Chicago. It was certainly a career highlight for me.

Raz-Russo: What was it like to almost always be the only female photographer, the only woman with a camera?

Ferrill: It was difficult and it also wasn’t. For example, I was with the press corps photographing a parade on State Street, and a policeman singled me out and told me I couldn’t take any more pictures. He didn’t take me anywhere, just out of the action. But most of the responses were pretty positive, and it also afforded me access because I was a novelty. I did a few assignments for the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Tribune, the Final Call, and Muhammad Speaks, among others, but I was always a freelance photographer and I don’t remember ever having a press pass. I remember once I went to shoot a Miles Davis concert, I think it was in 1975. I got to the stage door, and there were a bunch of photographers there. Roy Lewis was one of them. I went up to the little box and I said “My name is Mikki Ferrill and I’d like to shoot the concert” and a voice from in the box said “Let her in.” I was the only one they let in right away.

The same thing happened when I went to the Nation of Islam’s Saviours’ Day event, which I was introduced to by Rudy Harlow, who had a film production company, 5R Films. The Nation kept the press at bay at these events, but I stepped up and gave my name and they said “Let her in” even though the rest of the photographers were being held. The Nation always controlled the press, where they’re going to be, where they’re going to sit. If they didn’t want the press to see anything, the Fruit of Islam, their security guards, would circle the photographers so they couldn’t get any pictures. But they allowed me to wander alone. They gave me carte blanche. That’s how I got the picture of the “extraction”—the audience member getting escorted out of the venue. I think it’s a very tender extraction. It was kind of unusual because when they let the press in, they put them in a certain area, but I was wandering around in the aisle to get the right photo and all of a sudden I hear this commotion close to me. A man was heckling the Messenger [Elijah Muhammad]. I just stood up and took some pictures. They didn’t censor me, they never asked to see my work, and that was strange because they censored all the rest of the press. I think they trusted me and accepted me, and I never betrayed their trust.

I always did things on my own terms. I was really just taking pictures of everything—Saviours’ Day or the blizzard of 1967. Just out in the blizzard taking pictures. I was just crazy for photography. Still am.