The following audio tour entries and transcripts were originally produced in 2018 for the exhibition Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980. They include the first-person perspectives of many of the show’s featured photographers. The entries and transcripts have been lightly edited for their presentation here.

Introduction

Michal Raz-Russo: This exhibition looks at photographers and filmmakers who were working in Chicago between the 1950s and the 1970s, whose work came out of their intimate insider involvement in various Chicago communities. I’m Michal Raz-Russo, Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. Rather than looking at a survey of the history of filmmaking and photography, we’re presenting a constellation of works that provide a poetic narrative about all of the important social, political, cultural events that were taking place in the city.

Speaker 2: These people are revolutionaries.

Speaker 3: We have an ideology directly taken from the people.

Michal Raz-Russo: From the 1950s through the 1970s, the city was undergoing an incredible amount of change. There were urban renewal projects that were destroying neighborhoods, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Liberation movement, and the emergence of an incredibly influential art scene, music scene, film scene in Chicago that had national and international reach. Photography and filmmaking was a means by which to not only document, but also make important political, cultural statements.

Speaker 4: This audio guide is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Bob Crawford, At the Wall of Respect, 1967

Romi Crawford: The Wall of Respect is unique in many ways because there aren’t many other examples from the 1960s of collective art making of this caliber. I’m Romi Crawford, I’m an associate professor in the visual and critical studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is a photograph of Myrna Weaver, who painted the sports section of The Wall of Respect, which depicted sports figures that were popular, including Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Jim Brown. Bob Crawford was one of the photographers who worked around The Wall of Respect. He did not have an image on the wall itself, but regularly photographed The Wall of Respect and worked in a sort of camaraderie with the photographers who placed images on The Wall of Respect, including Darryl Cowherd, Robert Sengstacke, and Roy Lewis.

The racial politics and the social politics of Chicago were complicated in 1967. It was a segregated city. It was a city where Black people were restricted and kept out of many domains, including the visual arts. And so The Wall of Respect, in many ways, was a great example of Black artists of various types, photographers, painters, musicians, playwrights, writers taking the act of showing their work into their own hands. Photography is very important to The Wall of Respect. We wouldn’t know what The Wall of Respect looks like truly without the photographs that exist from 1967. So photography is really central to our re-understanding of The Wall of Respect as an important public artwork in Chicago.

Roy Lewis, Untitled (Gwendolyn Brooks Speaking at the Wall), 1967–71

Roy Lewis: The happening is the dedication of The Wall of Respect, which was done in 1967, in the summer of ’67. Okay, I’m Roy Lewis. I’m the photographer who took the picture of Gwendolyn Brooks in 1967 in front of The Wall of Respect. This was a moment when Ms. Brooks is getting ready to read her poem “Wall of Respect,” but this was the dedication ceremony. I worked at Johnson Publishing Company at the time, and I was asked to take some photographs of her for a story they were doing on her, and so we developed a friendship. I was kind of like maybe her official photographer for a period of time. She was a hardworking writer who wrote spectacular poetry and essays and a great teacher.

Gwendolyn Brooks: Kitchenette building. We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, / Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound.

Roy Lewis: I have two photographs on The Wall of Respect and was a part of the planning and part of the democratic process of electing who was to be on it on The Wall of Respect. It was a very personal piece and I think people sort of moved their kind of ego back and worked on it as a collective. This is Black nationalist time, this is African identifying time, and so that’s why The Wall was so important because it put all of that into one art piece. And one of the reasons we took it to the streets, because a lot of the institutions that this museum exhibit that you all are doing now, that wasn’t happening in ’67, and so that was one of the reactions. We said, “Okay, we’ll go to the street and we’ll do this for the community.”

Darryl Cowherd, Amiri Baraka at Dunbar High School, 1967

Darryl Cowherd: I couldn’t draw. I wasn’t really interested in painting. I did a little writing, but I was looking for something to do in the arts. And when I found that camera, it was just love at first sight.

My name is Darryl Cowherd and I am the photographer who took the photograph of Amiri Baraka in, I believe it was ’67, and it appeared on the historic Wall of Respect. Amiri Baraka initially was a poet-writer who became an activist.

Amiri Baraka: Andy Young slips on his Chamberlain appeasement getup he got from years listening to the CP hype Martin Luther King. Is there somebody here to record this? United States being thrown out the front door to [inaudible 00:00:48].

Darryl Cowherd: Chicago, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, was the most segregated city in the United States at that time.

Speaker 3: Chicago is the second city of this nation. Tonight, it is the nation’s number one battleground embroiled in racial strife. Eight out of ten Negro children go to segregated school.

Speaker 4: That the problem is so gigantic [inaudible 00:01:08]. That it demands a structural change.

Darryl Cowherd: I photographically grew up with some extremely talented guys. Most of us were Southsiders. We collectively insisted that the portraits of our communities needed to be different. For the most part, Black people, their heroes, if they had any, were dictated to them. They had no say so in selecting who they should admire or who they should emulate. So the impetus behind The Wall of Respect was that we selected a list of heroes and heroines, and with the approval of the community where The Wall of Respect was going up, then those were the images that we put on The Wall of Respect.

Gordon Parks, Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago, 1953

Mario Sprouse: Gordon Parks, famous as a photographer but also as a filmmaker, musician, composer, artist, was a tremendous Renaissance man of the twentieth century. My name is Mario Sprouse and I’m a musical director. For Gordon Parks, I was his musical assistant for over twenty years.

Speaker 2: What follows is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript written by Gordon Parks in 1953 for Life magazine about the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church.

Mario Sprouse: Big, glowing and white, the Metropolitan Baptist Church looms above this poverty-stricken Community Area 28 on Chicago’s Near West Side. It is a temple of hope to thousands of Negro people caught in the backyard of this vast city. Most of its members journeyed north hoping to shake free of a bitter past. But city living brought complexities as great as those of the south. In the stifling closeness of the city slum, frustration multiplied. There was need for leadership. They found Reverend Ledbetter, a big Arkansas man. Sunday is the big day. In about 700 emotional minutes, the church must repair the damage inflicted on its congregation during the preceding 156 hours. It must quench the hot thirst for dignity and belonging, kill the urges to sin, and make up for the pleasures that are denied. Reverend Ledbetter, six foot, brown-skinned and frock-coated, sweeps into the pulpit. He opens his Bible and calmly begins to preach. “What is my life?” A fervent wail answers, “Yes Lord, yes Lord.” Fully powered now, he drives on almost incoherent, while the audience takes meaning from the rhythm. He lifts them from the bondage of daily life into a world filled with hope.

Ozier Muhammad, Univ. of Islam School Assembly, 1966

Ozier Muhammad: The photograph is from 1966 in the Greenwood area of Chicago. It was taken at the University of Islam, which I was attending at the time. My name is Ozier Muhammad. I am a photographer in the exhibition. The University of Islam was the school for the nation of Islam, which was founded by my grandfather, Elijah Muhammad.

Speaker 2: We have lived in a world that is opposed to truth and righteousness. We have lived in a world that is opposed to the Aboriginal people of the earth, Black people.

Ozier Muhammad: And it was a school that taught the basics, the three R’s, reading, writing, arithmetic. Also, it taught Islam in the traditional way, Sunni Islam from the Quran and the life of Prophet Muhammad, but also it was imbued with Black nationalism.

Speaker 3: The political philosophy of Black nationalism only means that the Black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community.

Ozier Muhammad: Malcolm X was gaining some momentum, and he was a very heroic figure at the time. So my interest in photography, in the medium was piqued by the photographs that I saw of Malcolm published in various magazines and journals, newspapers, etc. The reason why I was interested in photography, because I thought it was a noble calling, and I thought it was a way of creating a record of African-Americans, who were struggling against all kinds of obstacles because of racism. And I also wanted to show as much about the humanity of African-American people.

The Wonder Inn, 1961

John Corbett: In the series of photographs that are black and white, we have photos by Alton Abraham. My name’s John Corbett and I’m a music writer, gallery owner, and occasional curator based here in Chicago. And Alton Abraham was the manager of the musician Sun Ra. Sun Ra was a jazz musician. He was a pianist and bandleader and great composer. Sun Ra is also well known for being an extraterrestrial. He was from Saturn.

Sun Ra: That’s another place in space beyond what you know as time where the gods of mythology dwell.

John Corbett: And went on in the 1970s and ’80s to be one of the most important avant-garde jazz musicians in the world, leading a giant band that he started here in Chicago called the Arkestra. These photographs are actually of the Arkestra in its nascent form in two venues, and these are the only photographs of those venues that we know of. One is a venue called the Casino Modern Ballroom, and those are the photographs where the band is actually playing on the bar. The other venue in these photographs has a sort of interior gazebo and they’re action shots. You can really see the tenor saxophonist, John Gilmore, who would go on to be an enormous influence on John Coltrane later. So the color photographs are by a fellow named Ayé Aton.

They’re actually documentation of his interior murals. These are murals that he painted on the insides of homes on the South and West side of Chicago. Ayé Aton was also connected to Sun Ra. He went in search of him having heard about him and by phone they had mentorship for about ten years. I think one of the most exciting things about both of these sets of photographs is the intimacy of them. You have a very candid snapshot of musicians who would later be on the world’s stages instead playing in tiny clubs on the South Side of Chicago, people who were very much a part of the community in the audience, listening to them and having periscope into those scenes where this music is being tested out on a very discerning and very critical audience.

Tom Palazzolo, The Tattooed Lady of Riverview, 1967

Tom Palazzolo: Yes. Are we rolling? We’re rolling. Good. My name is Tom Palazzolo and I’m a filmmaker living in Chicago. Since childhood, I was always interested in amusement parks, so I took a trip to the Riverview Park, which was on the North Side of Chicago. It was a very old amusement park, probably close to one hundred years old. And it was very obvious to me that with all the movement and action, that it would be a good place to film and looked around and found the so-called Freak Show. It was actually called Show of Wonders. Well, right away I could see that the tattooed lady would make an interesting subject.

Speaker 2: A tattooed lady is an even greater rarity than a bearded lady.

Tom Palazzolo: At first, she said she was not interested, but then when I went to another female performer, her name was Jane Lee, I remember, and she would stand on a metal platform that must’ve had a current coming through. So I remember one of the things she did was she held a light bulb in her mouth and the current would turn the light bulb on. The tattooed lady was jealous that I was spending time with the light bulb lady, and she then said, “Yes,” she would let me film her and talk to her.

Things were just getting going then, and there was a lot of interest in so-called underground films, experimental films. I remember a bunch of us even put together a little group called the Center Cinema Co-op, where filmmakers would put their films in this co-op, and we would get opportunities to show them from film groups all over the city and suburbs. Even reviewers like Roger Ebert seemed to be interested in what we were doing. It seemed to be fresh and new kind of approach to film.

Danny Lyon, Uptown, Chicago, 1965

Roger Guy: This photographer, on an emotional level, he was able to capture the humility of the southern migrants themselves, and he was able to provide a counterbalance to the prevailing hillbilly stereotype.

Yeah, my name is Roger Guy. I’m a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. The population of Southerners in Uptown, some say at one point in the sixties, 40 percent of Uptown was southern white migrants, and about 70 percent were concentrated in about four census tracts in the heart of Uptown.

Some were farmers, former farmers, coal miners. A lot of them were from mountain regions. But there were also a lot of single women that were curious and came up. There were families that were escaping unemployment, younger men, perhaps like these younger guys, looking for adventure.

So they weren’t just a large group of destitute migrants fleeing the coal fields, as many people envisioned them. The press referred to it as the Hillbilly Jungle, filled with miscreants, sexual deviants, drunkards. And that jungle stereotype emerged with a series of articles in the 1950s, written by Norma Lee Browning. The Southerners referred to it as Hillbilly Heaven themselves, and evolved as maybe a reaction to the notion that this was a Hillbilly Jungle.

Eleanor Boyer, JoAnn: My Sister the Mail Carrier, 1977

Eleanor Boyer: The tape, JoAnn: My Sister the Mail Carrier, is a tape that my friend Karen Peugh and I produced in 1977. The way it came about is part of the story of this evolution of early video in Chicago. My name is Eleanor Boyer, and I’ve been an independent video producer in Chicago since the mid-1970s. Sony created Portapak in the late 1960s.

Speaker 2: This is a camera that many of you have been waiting for, for some time.

Eleanor Boyer: And that was the very first portable video system. It had the advantage of being portable, and also you could record simultaneously audio and picture.

Speaker 3: Check, check, check. Okay, we’re rolling.

Eleanor Boyer: And once you had done the recording, you could play it back immediately and see what you had done.

Speaker 4: I would ask for jobs that were a little harder physically.

Eleanor Boyer: There was an individual named Tom Weinberg. He suggested that these video makers get together and produce a program which would be called Slices of Chicago. Karen and I had become friends and we had similar interests. We were both interested in women’s issues. We knew JoAnn Elam, who was, at the time, had just recently been hired to be a mail carrier. There were very few female mail carriers. There were a lot of women working in the post office, but very few were mail carriers, especially in urban settings. Karen and I decided that she would be a good subject for our vignette about life in Chicago.

I see what I was doing in the early 1970s as the beginning point for what we are experiencing now, people walking around with their phones and creating videos automatically and sharing them over the internet. But the invention of portable video was the first step in that whole process.

Kartemquin Films, Now We Live on Clifton, 1974

Gordon Quinn: We believe that the media and film and verite filmmaking, letting people tell their own stories, that kind of thing, had a critical role to play in the democratic process. I’m Gordon Quinn, one of the founders and the artistic director of Kartemquin Films. I got out of college and worked for a couple of years in the industry. I came back to Chicago, hooked up with Temner and Carter was still around, and we formed this little film company called Kartemquin Films. It was the sixties. Kartemquin was quickly evolving into a collective that at its peak was thirteen or fourteen people, and some of the people had backgrounds in union organizing, they were teachers, and the other half were people coming out of film, but we were going to change the world.

Now We Live on Clifton. We very consciously made the decision that we were going to make these two films about white working-class families. And the other thing that we were very committed to is these weren’t going to feature children. These were going to be from the perspective of children, so you’d get to know the family through the kids, and you’d get to know the school, and you’d get to know the kind of world that these kids lived in by starting with them and looking out.

Peter Kuttner: When I got to Chicago with some films that this group The Newsreel had made, I looked for like-minded filmmakers and I found some. And the people who had founded Kartemquin Films came to our first meetings. I’m Peter Kuttner. I’m the filmmaker of Cause Without a Rebel. The film that I made had to do with the apathy of the Northwestern campus to the Civil Rights Movement. I was not an activist at the time, but I was getting really moved by what was going on. There may well have been activists on the campus, but I didn’t know them. It was in a way much more about me. I’m really challenging myself. And in fact, once the film is made and it’s shown and there’s this self-righteous indictment of the campus body, the student body, I realize I haven’t done anything myself. It not only transformed me as a political activist, but it transformed me as a filmmaker in that it was really the first film that I ever finished and that came from me.