That I have spent more than four decades writing for newspapers has done nothing to enlighten me to the mystery of photography. Working with dozens of men and women with cameras who accompanied me on hundreds of stories, I have watched as they did their work and then been consistently amazed at what they captured. It was as if magic was involved.
Photographer John White and I spent many days together, including some on a 1978 trip to New Orleans to cover Muhammad Ali’s boxing rematch against Leon Spinks (Ali won). But that’s for another time. White was for more than four decades a staff photographer for the Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times, a career cut sadly short when he and 27 other shooters were unceremoniously fired by the paper in March 2013.
Now he has an exhibition of his work at Roosevelt University’s Gage Gallery, a handsome space at the back of the lobby at 18 S. Michigan Ave. (roosevelt.edu/gagegallery). The show, “Faith, Focus, Flight: A John H. White Retrospective,” is the first part of an ambitious series presented by Roosevelt University, “Above the Fold: 10 Decades of Chicago Photojournalism.” His show, which runs through Dec. 20, will be followed by “Crime Then and Now: Through the Lens of the Chicago Tribune” and “Chicago Reader in Black & White.” (The first two shows are co-curated by Tyra Robertson, director of instructional technology and an instructor at Roosevelt, and Chicago Tribune picture editor Michael Zajakowski; Robertson curates the third.)
White’s show is also one of three current exhibitions that need to be seen, the others devoted to the works of Steve Schapiro and Michael Abramson. It is a terrific fall trifecta.
Schapiro has 20 photos on display at the relatively new and very snazzy Ed Paschke Art Center at 5415 W. Higgins Ave. in the Jefferson Park neighborhood (edpaschke.org). For all of the attention given the current David Bowie hoopla at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bowie is also here and worth seeing, along with stunning shots of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol and some of their lively pals, most taken during the raucous period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.
Schapiro was born and raised in New York City and first picked up a camera when he was attending a summer camp. He kept shooting while studying with W. Eugene Smith, a legendarily uncompromising photojournalist, and attending college before embarking on a freelance career in the 1960s.
Shooting for Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and other publications during what he calls “the golden age of photojournalism,” he captured migrant workers in Arkansas and Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 march in Selma, Ala. He was there in 1967 as the “Summer of Love” colorfully overwhelmed the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco.
In person, he is small and soft-spoken and filled with energy. People like him immediately, and he was able to get close to his subjects. He shot Marlon Brando during filming of “The Godfather,” Robert Kennedy many times, Chevy Chase (Schapiro, nearing 80, and his wife are the godparents of the actor’s daughter), Jerry Garcia, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Johnny Depp, Mae West, Satchel Paige, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Buster Keaton, Richard Pryor, Sophia Loren.
It’s a star-studded gang, but Schapiro means it when he says, “Emotions are what really interest me.” And it is a testament to his skill and charm and ongoing vitality that, in addition to the handful of books he has published in the last decade, Bowie has used his photos himself.
Abramson shot famous people, too, but none of them is among the three dozen photos on the walls of the second floor of the library at Columbia College Chicago, 624 S. Michigan Ave. (mocp.org), through Dec. 19. It’s titled “Pulse of the Night,” a very sexy show capturing the faces and bodies of people who are enjoying the many vivacious pleasures of nightclubs late at night and in the early morning.
Originally from New Jersey and a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Abramson fell in love with photography and, eschewing a career in business, came here to study at Illinois Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
“The camera gave me a tool that seemed to justify my going anywhere. Yes, I went places that some white Chicagoans wouldn’t go, but I think my naivete was empowering,” Abramson told me a few years ago.
In those places — South Side clubs such as Pepper’s, in various incarnations, and Perv’s House, during the 1970s — he started taking pictures. He would take thousands, but he stored them away as he began a very successful commercial career, traveling the globe and shooting such famous folks as Oprah Winfrey, Donald Rumsfeld, Louis Farrakhan, Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan for publications such as The New York Times, Fortune, People, Time, Forbes and Sports Illustrated. His work sits in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, Art Institute of Chicago, California Museum of Photography, Chicago History Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum.
When he rediscovered those old club photos, they led to a Tribune magazine cover story in 2008, which led in turn to the publication of the book “Light on the South Side,” (published by Chicago-based Numero Group in a handsome package with nearly 100 photos, and accompanied by two albums of music of the era). In an introductory essay, acclaimed British author Nick Hornby writes, “Like a good novelist, Abramson is particularly attuned to relationships and how to frame them.”
Abramson died of cancer in 2011, but a couple of years before that he told me, “I look back over all these years and I realize I have been to every part of the planet. … But I have never been as far away as I was when I was on the South Side of Chicago. Not because it was exotic, in the misused sense of that word, but because it was so exhilarating.”
Now, back to White, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and has also for decades been an inspirational teacher. You will be immediately struck by the first photo you see, of the rundown shack of his grandmother, Mrs. Josephine Freeman Lever, where White grew up in Lexington, N.C. And the others are equally captivating. There are fires and other tragedies. There are the faces of the famous — Ali, of course, but also Walter Payton, Nelson Mandela, Jessie Jackson, Michelle Obama and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin — and also a great many children, captured in exuberant play. Please don’t miss the gathering of six photos of a cat on a window ledge. And watch a video screen that shows more photos and airs an interview with White.
We live in an age in which everyone is a photographer. Just grab your phone. But what you will see in these three shows will convince you that you maybe aren’t such a good photographer, and that the best photographers are artists and that they bring heart to their work and give dignity to their subjects.
The shows also echo something Schapiro once told me: “All of us are unique, and we work with that. I think we are on the way to a day when cameras as we have known them will be obsolete. We will be using just cellphones to take photos as the technology advances and the quality gets better. But I will ever believe that it is the photographer who counts, not the camera.”
These three photographers count. Their shows are free, and they are unforgettable.
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
