“Once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”1

—Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make, 1951^[1]2

In 1973 Mikki Ferrill—whose career in photography was just gaining momentum after several years of apprenticeship in Mexico—was approached by fellow photographer Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke with an invitation to submit photo essays for the Saturday edition of the Chicago Defender, the city’s revered Black-owned and -run newspaper.^[2] Beginning in January of that year, Ferrill’s stories appeared in print. Each featured a handful of images tiled on a page and accompanied by Ferrill’s own text, providing intimate, joyful glimpses into the city’s West and South Side neighborhoods. They include, for example, “W-Side Shine Boys Thrive” (January 20, 1973), about Cole’s Shine King, a West Side business that provided employment to young men; “What Can I Do?” (April 7, 1973), which highlighted South Side resident Mickey Madison’s youth dance classes; and “Grooving at The Garage” (July 14, 1973; fig. 1), a story that cemented the improvised music venue that popped up every Sunday in a Bronzeville car garage as, in Ferrill’s words, “the place to be.”^[3] More than reportage, Ferrill’s images for the Defender speak to the beauty, coolness, and vitality born of community, against the background of Chicago’s segregated economic and social landscape. As artist Carrie Mae Weems stated in a 1982 interview while discussing the work of Ferrill and another Chicago photographer, Billy Abernathy (also known by the name Fundi, adopted in the 1970s), these images provide 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.”^[4] Ferrill’s and Abernathy’s photographs were as much a form of call-and-response as they were a challenge to documentary practices that imply an outside observer, and as a result they stand apart from the work that has come to dominate the discourse around photography in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s.3

Ferrill’s and Abernathy’s approaches were emblematic of the work of a larger group of Black photographers to which they belonged. Rooted in the South Side of Chicago and unaffiliated with any academic or institutional framework, this group of photographers were connected, according to groundbreaking photography historian Deborah Willis, via their dedication “to the Civil Rights Movement, community development, documentary photography, and portraying the heightened African American consciousness of the period.”^[5] Their work was shaped by their connection to Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods, then emerging as a center for not only the Civil Rights Movement but also the Black Power Movement. As the artistic complement to the Black Power Movement, the Black Arts Movement promoted the principles of self-definition and self-determination and called for urgent, community-based action. As the graffiti in Darryl Cowherd’s 1968 photograph Woodlawn/Chicago (fig. 2) proclaims, “The Time Is Now / Be Black.”4

Documentary photography played an important role in all of these movements.^[6] At the same time, the South Side artists featured here took an approach to image-making that paralleled that of other photographers active across Chicago whose process was also deeply connected to their communities and to the city’s history. Although work by these Black photographers has been sidelined compared to other threads of Chicago’s storied photographic history, it in fact rewrites that history when given its due attention. At the time, the most widely seen documentary depictions of African Americans tended to focus on struggle. The photographers featured here, meanwhile, defiantly depicted the moments of beauty, creativity, and pride that made Chicago the center of Black American culture.5

For much of the twentieth century, Chicago was a hub for photography and film production, a quiet industry and artistic force both driven and challenged by the city’s location between the coasts. Multiple groups of artists focused on photography formed in Chicago over the years, many under the umbrella of academic institutions, but they are rarely viewed through the lens of their vital connection to the city and its fraught economic, social, and political history. By the late 1960s Chicago’s cultural infrastructure supported a thriving, albeit disconnected, photography scene with a national profile. Columbia College, the University of Illinois Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) offered classes and majors in photography, with many now-renowned artists graduating from all three programs. Chicago photography came to be defined nationally, however, by the work of students at the influential photography program at the Institute of Design (or ID, formerly the New Bauhaus and School of Design in Chicago), which championed a formally driven and experimental modernist approach and was led by celebrated photographers Harry Callahan (see fig. 3) and Aaron Siskind (see fig. 4), among others.6

The Art Institute of Chicago, meanwhile, differentiated itself as one of the few museums in the country to have a dedicated photography department and an exhibition program dating back to 1900. By the 1970s several Chicago photographers—including Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Joseph D. Jachna, Danny Lyon, and Ray Metzker—had had solo exhibitions at the museum. Of these exhibitions featuring local photographers, only one was Black: Robert Earl Wilson in 1962. Notably, the only Black photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago prior to Wilson was Gordon Parks in 1952, who had early-career ties to Chicago (see fig. 5) and was by then a celebrated staff photographer for Life magazine.^[7] Wilson—who was known by the nickname “Trees” and later changed his name to Adeoshun Ifalade—mentored several Black South Side photographers in the 1960s. In the text accompanying his Art Institute exhibition, Chicago and Its People, curator Hugh Edwards commended Wilson’s photographs for their dialogue with the city and for communicating “the atmosphere of the complex and contradictory time in which he finds himself situated.”^[8]7

During those same decades an intergenerational group of Black photographers active on the city’s South Side was largely absent from the academic and institutional circles that came to define Chicago photography nationally. While a handful of these artists took and even taught classes at, for example, SAIC, the majority were self-taught and relied on local networks and organizations for their training. As such, mentorship and community were crucial to developing their approaches and styles. They were equally aware of and influenced by the work of both a previous generation of Black photographers—Parks and Roy DeCarava among them—and of non-Black photographers like Lyon and Robert Frank, who created some of their best-known images in Chicago.^[9] A combination of factors led to this group’s exclusion from the dominant photographic circles of the time. As Natalie Y. Moore notes in her essay in this publication, their work and its lack of recognition reflects how “opportunity and inequity have always coexisted in Black Chicago.” These artists operated outside of the city’s central academic frameworks, which had yet to fully embrace their documentary, photojournalistic approach as “fine art photography,” although they themselves saw their work that way. Still, their output also fits neatly into a tradition of documentary photography practiced in dialogue with Chicago’s cultural, political, and social landscape. Considered from this vantage, their work brings into focus a history of Chicago photography that centers photographers and filmmakers across the city who employed documentary approaches that helped define their respective communities or make them visible.8

The Art Institute’s 2018 exhibition Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980, which ran from May 12 to October 28, placed the work of these Black artists in conversation with the broader history of Chicago photography.^[10] The photographs and films in the exhibition were made by artists working from the 1950s through the early 1980s who portrayed their own communities or those to which they gained intimate access. It focused in particular on the work of South Side photographers, whose connection to their neighborhoods was key to their style and approach. While the museum has an extensive, celebrated collection of work made in Chicago by Chicago photographers, this historically did not include the work of Black photographers active across the city’s South Side from the 1950s through late 1970s. By the close of the exhibition, works by several of the photographers had been added to the museum’s collection, including Cowherd, Bob Crawford, Ferrill, Ozier Muhammad, and James Stricklin, all featured in this publication. This digital catalogue documents the exhibition and serves as an archive for some of the resources created for it, including audio and video interviews with artists and related contributors.9

This publication aims to revise the history of photography in Chicago by foregrounding work by Black artists on the South Side as central to the city’s photographic history, arguing that their images underscore the influence of Chicago’s fraught political geography on form and style. It is not intended to be comprehensive but rather to open the door to reconsidering Chicago’s photographic legacy. The artists’ own voices and histories, presented here through two conversations, support these aims. The first of these conversations, a public roundtable, took place at the Art Institute on October 25, 2018, between artists Cowherd, Roy Lewis, Muhammad, and Stricklin, on the occasion of the exhibition Never a Lovely So Real. The video recording of the exhibition is included here, as well as an edited transcription. The second is an edited collection of several conversations with Ferrill between 2017 and 2019 at her home in Oakland, California. The essays reflect on these artists’ impact from a range of perspectives: In her essay in this volume, Romi Crawford outlines the range of factors and events, both local and national, that led to the increased recognition of Black Arts Movement photographers in recent years. Grace Deveney provides an in-depth survey of how the moving image—film and television—became yet another important form of expression for these artists. Moore offers a history of the racist housing policies that helped entrench segregation in Chicago, including in the Chatham neighborhood where she grew up. Personal texts by Tempestt Hazel and Tonika Johnson reflect on the legacy of image-making for artists, archivists, and activists in their Chicago communities.10

Chicago, with its promise of industrial employment, became a major destination for Black Americans fleeing racial violence and the oppression of Jim Crow policies in the rural South during the Great Migration, which took place from approximately 1915 to 1970. By the 1930s, however, the newly established Federal Housing Administration’s loan rating scale, which was based on neighborhoods’ perceived social stability, led to practices such as redlining—denying loans and other services to Black citizens—and other forms of systemic discrimination. As a result, Chicago became one of the most segregated cities in the United States; it remains so to this day. One of its nicknames, the “City of Neighborhoods,” is as much an acknowledgment of its segregated past and present as it is a nod to its diverse cultural geography. Both of these facets are reflected in the rich history of its cultural and artistic production.11

Since the 1950s photographers and filmmakers in particular focused on Chicago as a city of neighborhoods, segregated or fiercely separated from one another yet individually imbued with a strong sense of community. In 1965 Lyon traveled on his Triumph motorcycle from his home in Hyde Park to the Uptown neighborhood, an area that had acquired the nickname “Hillbilly Heaven” for its large number of immigrants from central Appalachia. Over a period of several months, Lyon befriended several families living on Clifton Avenue, making images that depict their struggles but also their immense community pride (see fig. 6). In the late 1970s Luis Medina photographed territorial gang graffiti he found in his own neighborhood northwest of Wrigley Field. He eventually gained the trust of members of several Latino gangs, who allowed him to take their portraits in front of their graffiti, in a further gesture of power and defiance (see fig. 7). Other photographers saw the notion of community expressed in the city’s architecture. Richard Nickel, for example, photographed architect Louis Sullivan’s buildings (see fig. 8) in an extension of a photographic survey begun by Aaron Siskind and his students at the Institute of Design that evolved into a preservation campaign. And filmmakers and production companies such as Eleanor Boyer, Kartemquin Films, Peter Kuttner, and Tom Palazzolo (see fig. 9) documented communities as sites of activism, their subjects ranging from a female postal worker in Logan Square to the gentrification of the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Similarly, the Black photographers and filmmakers featured here reflected South Side neighborhoods as they emerged as centers for the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the Black Arts Movement. Through these vital connections to their city and community, this group created documentary work focused on representation, self-determination, and activism. Taking into account their nuanced view of Black American life reshapes our understanding of Chicago as a hub for photographic production in the second half of the twentieth century. Although they received little recognition or support at the time from mainstream institutions, even in their own city, their vision and approach were nonetheless influential, especially for generations of artists who followed in their footsteps.12

Figs. 6–9

The 1986 exhibition Two Schools, New York and Chicago: Contemporary African-American Photography of the 60s and 70s (see fig. 10) at Kenkeleba House in New York presented work by Black photographers from Chicago’s South Side as the “Chicago School.” It was the first time these photographers were labeled as a group, and both the group and exhibition names suggest an effort to recenter what had come to be known as Chicago photography. The list of artists selected to represent Chicago, although far from comprehensive, was generationally and stylistically diverse: in addition to Abernathy and Ferrill, it included Crawford, Ted Gray, Hinton, Wilson, Brent Jones, Ozier Muhammad, Reg Patrick, Sengstacke, Jim Taylor, and Onikwa Bill Wallace. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, organized by photographer Frank Stewart, Deborah Willis, Sengstacke, and then-associate director of Kenkeleba House Corrine Jennings, recognized the group’s unified approach to image making and its inextricable ties to the city’s geography and history. In the catalogue, Stewart (presented in the exhibition as a member of the New York school, although he grew up and studied photography in Chicago) noted that, compared to New York, “Chicago represented a more isolated environment in which the subject matter was motivated by the microcosm of Black culture.”^[11] Willis elaborated further in her essay: “This informal school (it had mentors, but no formal buildings)…used photography as a tool to document the changing faces of the Black community—whether abandoned buildings, brightly filled streets, or candid portraits of the men, women, and children of the harsh Chicago inner-city.”^[12] By comparison, the “New York School” was defined as an extension of the Kamoinge Workshop, a formal collective of Black photographers established in New York in 1963.^[13] And yet the ideals of the two groups were very similar; as founding Kamoinge member Louis Draper wrote in a history of the workshop, “we speak of our lives as only we can.”^[14]13

The photographers featured in Two Schools challenged and complicated mainstream media representations of their communities, much as Lyon, Medina, and others already cited did. They created images that stand out for depicting Black everyday life in ways that foreground bold and at times even confrontational expressions of joy, beauty, and cool—images that were attuned to their community as both audience and subject, speaking both to them and for them. Included in the Two Schools exhibition were, for example, Ferrill’s head-on photograph of an elegant man getting into the driver’s seat of a Cadillac El Clasico, titled Pimping Chicago Style; Wallace’s exuberant portrait of a drummer, taken from a low perspective as if the camera were the drum; and Gray’s fantastical Snow Phantom (fig. 11).14

These photographers, as well as others not included in Two Schools, created work intended to be in conversation with and to complicate existing representations of Black struggle and resistance, not merely replace them. The images are neither overtly political nor easily grouped under any photographic -ism, but they are entirely shaped by the city and political environment in which their makers and subjects lived.
15

As there were few established venues or formal outlets for these photographers to present their work—either locally or nationally—they often created their own spaces and forms of circulation, from books, journals, and periodicals, to public murals and informal sites of display. Notable among these was The Black Photographers Annual (fig. 12), conceived by New York–based photographer Beuford Smith and members of the Kamoinge Workshop. The Annual, which was only published four times (1973, 1974, 1976, and 1980), featured selected portfolios submitted by Black photographers from across the United States. In her foreword to the first volume, Toni Morrison wrote that the photographers succeeded in “telling us what we had forgotten we knew, showing us new things about ancient lives, and old truths in new phenomena.”^[15] Chicago photographers—and their images of Chicago neighborhoods—had a significant presence in the Annual; Crawford, Ferrill, Gray, Muhammad, Sengstacke, and Ted Williams were all featured.
16

The photographers’ works were perhaps most widely seen at the time in periodicals published by and for Black Americans, among them the Chicago Defender, Johnson Publishing Company magazines such as Ebony and Jet, and Muhammad Speaks, the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam. In these publications’ pages, photographs by Ferrill, Lewis, Sengstacke, and others focused on local events that either were not of interest to other press outlets or could not be accessed by their reporters and photographers. For example, the Nation of Islam allowed only select photographers to document, under tight restrictions, their annual Saviours’ Day Convention, established by leader Elijah Muhammad.^[16] Ferrill’s photograph capturing a protestor reacting to Elijah Muhammad’s address (fig. 13) offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a group that maintained close control over its public image. Other images created as a form of reportage—many of them never published—serve as important counterpoints to mass-media representations, in part because the photographer’s relationship to the individual or community depicted is central to the image. Similarly, Ozier Muhammad, grandson of Elijah Muhammad, photographed daily life inside the Nation of Islam (fig. 14) with a camera given to him by Wallace, his cousin. Sengstacke, in a 1965 photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s rally at the Robert Taylor Homes in the Bronzeville neighborhood (fig. 15), captured King from behind to highlight the audience and the architecture of what was then the largest public housing project in the United States. Darryl Cowherd’s searing close-range photographs of the 1966 White People’s March in Gage Park (fig. 16)—a demonstration by the American Nazi Party against King’s housing desegregation campaign—were facilitated by a marcher who was a high-school classmate of the artist.17

Figs. 13–16

These photographs were rarely seen outside of the printed page. When they were exhibited publicly, it was usually in Black-run venues on the South Side or in unconventional spaces. Abernathy’s 1967 show Love What You Are and Live Flicks of the Hip World, for example, was mounted on the South Side at Shepherd’s Gallery at 347 East Thirty-First Street, while in 1968 Lewis exhibited a series of portraits under the title Black and Beautiful at the South Side Community Art Center, founded in 1940.^[17] Ferrill exhibited her work at Malcolm X and Olive Harvey colleges. And in 1974 and 1975, Ferrill, Sengstacke, and Wallace organized juried exhibitions of photographs as part of Black Esthetics, an arts and culture festival held at the Museum of Science and Industry annually from 1970 to 1984.^[18] Sengstacke, whose work primarily appeared in the pages of the Chicago Defender, chose a unique presentation format for exhibitions at spaces such as the South Side Community Art Center, creating photographic assemblages that focused on sites of Black collectivity and pride, such as The Wall of Respect and the Zambezi Art Guild.^[19]18

The Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural located at Forty-Third Street and Langley Avenue in the Bronzeville neighborhood (see fig. 17), is perhaps the best-known and most celebrated emblem of the centrality of community and collaboration in these local artistic networks.^[20] The Wall was conceived in 1967 as the first public artwork created by the Visual Arts Workshop, part of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), established in 1967 by artists, writers, activists, and educators working to foster artistic activity on Chicago’s South Side. Several artists belonging to OBAC went on to form the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA) in 1968, an organization that likewise sought to uplift the Black community through interdisciplinary artwork; AfriCOBRA eventually became the most visible and unified expression of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement.^[21] Echoing the principles that brought all these artists together, The Wall of Respect was intended as an expression of OBAC’s purpose, in part, to “provide the Black Community with a positive image of itself, its history, its achievements, and its possibilities for creativity.”^[22] The mural, which featured Black heroes grouped into seven sections, was assembled by twenty-one artists, four of them photographers: Abernathy, Cowherd, Lewis, and Sengstacke, each of whom incorporated photographs into the mural’s design. The Wall’s design evolved continuously until a 1971 fire led to the building’s demolition.19

The importance of The Wall of Respect in Chicago art discourse was chronicled in a 2015 symposium at SAIC and a 2017 exhibition and publication by Romi Crawford, Abdul Alkalimat, and Rebecca Zorach.^[23] As Crawford explains, photography’s relationship to the mural extended beyond the photographs integrated into its design to images of The Wall itself—its conception, creation, and use as a site for community activism.^[24] The mural’s impact and influence was immediate: In 1968, inspired by The Wall of Respect and spurred by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, Lewis invited Bob Crawford and Sengstacke to create a trio of photographic murals with him.^[25] Each of these subsequent murals, among them Lewis’s West Wall: Proud of Being Black, was composed almost exclusively of portraits—the faces of the community reflected back at themselves (see fig. 18).20

Ferrill also participated in a community-focused project, The Garage, that, like The Wall of Respect, was both a a venue and a subject for photography. After spending three years in Mexico apprenticing with Williams, Ferrill returned to Chicago, her hometown, in 1970. Then and throughout the ensuing years, she was the only woman in the informal group that is the focus of this publication. While working as a freelance photographer for several publications, Ferrill began documenting the space at 610 East Fiftieth Street, a garage owned by Arthur “Pops” Simpson, who transformed it into a music venue every Sunday. A typical Sunday at The Garage (also known as The Alley) began with jazz DJ battles in the afternoon followed by live or recorded music jams that lasted through the evening. Ferrill photographed these events regularly for ten years, becoming known in The Garage’s community as “The Picture-Taking Lady.” Some of the images she made there appeared in a Chicago Defender article and in various group publications and exhibitions, but the series as a whole was only shown on the walls of The Garage itself, in an informal installation Simpson created with prints Ferrill had given him as gifts (fig. 19). As Ferrill later recalled, Simpson “covered the walls of The Garage with pictures of [the people] themselves.”^[26] In their extraordinary intimacy, vitality, and style, the photographs also reflect Ferrill’s own energizing presence in The Garage. As she once stated in an interview, “Show me a photo and I’ll tell you about the photographer.”^[27]21

Beyond these temporary presentations, books offered another innovative means of distribution. In 1969 Lewis published a book titled West Wall, featuring photographs included in his mural, West Wall: Proud of Being Black (see fig. 20), alongside text written by poet Eugene Perkins in response to the images. The book’s format reflects the legacy of photo-text collaborations by Black artists that came before it, among them 12 Million Black Voices (1941), a selection of Farm Security Administration photographs chosen by editor and photographer Edwin Rosskam with text by Richard Wright, and The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), featuring photographs by Roy DeCarava and text by Langston Hughes. The text in West Wall amplifies the aims of the images as well as the choice of murals and books as the form of display and dissemination: “Beautiful monuments / of Blackness for / Black people to dig.”^[28] A few years earlier, in 1964, Stanford Winfield Williamson composed a fictional narrative based on images (again, mostly portraits) by South Side photographers Jerry Cogbill, Don Sparks, and Stricklin, published as With Grief Acquainted (see fig. 21). 22

The book project that gained the most national recognition was perhaps In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style (fig. 22), published in 1970 by Abernathy and writer Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones. In the catalogue for Two Schools, Stewart cited In Our Terribleness as an important publication representing the “Chicago School.” Abernathy began photographing in the 1950s and by the 1960s was collaborating with his partner, graphic designer Sylvia (Laini) Abernathy to design album covers for Delmark Records, a Chicago label. Around that time, Baraka encountered Abernathy’s photographs of Chicago and proposed a book project that would combine his poetry with Abernathy’s images.23

Designed by Sylvia (who also designed the layout of The Wall of Respect), In Our Terribleness is both a statement on the importance of Black art and a call to action. Its images are nearly all portraits, taken almost exclusively on Chicago’s South Side, and, as writer and critic Vince Aletti wrote, they “define black cool. It’s not flash, not bling, but confidence, vivacity, and an elegance so understated it’s almost subliminal.”^[29] It’s a cool rooted in Chicago’s history, in the South Side’s history, a cool that speaks of beauty, strength, and pride of place. In this spirit, it is emblematic of the work of all of the photographers featured in the present publication.
24

In summer 2018 two Art Institute visitors saw one of Abernathy’s photographs from In Our Terribleness on display in the Never a Lovely So Real exhibition. It depicts two elegantly dressed young men leaning against a building. One of the visitors, Gwen Washington, instantly recognized the elaborate architectural ornaments in the background of the photograph as belonging to the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Francis Apartments in Bronzeville, where she herself grew up. Her daughter, Laura Washington, a local journalist, recounted their visit in an article in the Chicago Sun-Times.^[30] She noted that the building, completed in 1895, was originally intended for white, middle-class residents and came to be occupied by Black migrants from the South when the white population abandoned the area during a period of “white flight.” The building was demolished in 1971, and its decorative iron gates are now in the Art Institute’s collection. According to Laura’s article, however, what most caught Gwen’s attention were the flowers pinned to the two young men’s jackets: “On Mother’s Day we all wore flowers. You wore a white flower if your mother was dead. You wore a red flower if your mother was living.”^[31] Her own mother made the artificial flowers and sold them to neighborhood residents. The photograph and others echo Baraka’s words in In Our Terribleness and also serve as a fitting introduction to the images featured in this publication: “There are mostly portraits here. Portraits of life. Of life being lived.”^[32]25