From The Vault Of Art Shay: On Authors And Writing
By Art Shay in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 4, 2012 6:00PM
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his archives, Art shares the secret to telling a good story.)
Every wannabe photographer and writer wants to learn the secret of being a pro. It’s simple: tell interesting stories.
My father, Herman Shay, was a born storyteller who hung aroung St. Petersberg, Russia with the likes of young Leon Trotsky. He passed his 1896 folding Kodak to me when I was 14, in 1936. “Something happens,” he said, “take a picture. You find a pencil and paper? Write a story like Trotsky or a pamphlet, if you’re really angry about something." The French, he taught me later, called the mode a feuilleton: “a piece of fire.”
With nervous glee, first Sunday out of the Bronx, I Kodaked FDR, cigarette Akimbo, his etched political candidate smile on his patrician face. It happened when our Camp Peter Pan Bus stopped for the Presidential Lincoln on the Boston Post Road, no doubt en route to a weekend at Hyde Park. A Secret Service man presciently yelled, “No Pictures, Sonny!” as I furtively wound the verichrome. The phrase would be a chime in my life to come
You are at this moment being hocked internationally by a just-turned 90-year-old man, a former racquetball state and national champion, an athlete on now shaky knees, about to be inducted into both the Illinois and National Raquetball Halls of Fame. I see by my resume I was a war hero who's hit the national magazines with some 28,000 published pictures, a writer of perhaps 1,000 published articles, columns, blogs and book reviews, 60 or so minor books and two professionally produced plays. I've been blurbed by David Mamet, Roger Ebert and Hugh Hefner, and interviewed by Studs Terkel when my first of two Algren books appeared.
The director of The French Connection has averred that my grittier pictures influenced the style of his downbeat movie. I remember picking up my prints at Billy Friedkin's mother's Chicago apartment.
I'm exactly the kind of successful blowhard I avoid out of instinct, hair-trigger boredom and jealousy.
My proudest achievements have been five gifted back-talking children, six perky grandchildren and one great grandson, all creditable. My still-beautiful, feisty wife Florence is the famed rare book dealer who founded Titles,Inc. in Highland Park, Ill., and she and I used to polish off the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in an hour with our eyes dulled by TV with the sound off. It came as a challenge to us that the Clintons, when in the White House, did the puzzle in half an hour.
The above is all by way of confessing that I am a book lover, collector and groupie of authors, despite my having published pictures of most of the icons of my own rachitic century. (And disparate famous images of my times.)
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Nelson Algren's Chicago, is also available at Amazon.