Chicago Photoblogger Has NYT Cred

By Sam Bakken in Miscellaneous on Jun 8, 2005 10:44PM

In an article about photoblogs published today in the New York Times, one of Chi-town's own, Ron Slattery, gets four paragraphs! It's nice to see another member of the Chibloggo (prop-nod) community gettin' some respeck.

Slattery is curator of bighappyfunhouse.com, a collection of found, or what Slattery calls "vernacular", photography from the 1800's to the present. The photos are spooky, hilarious and sexy (did we mention hilarious and spooky?). The majority of those linked examples are only from the March archives. We recommend that you look through the full archives yourself because you'll find plenty more great photos. Then you can look at them and assign your very own adjective to each one.

We called Slattery to get some more information and though he had a barrage of congratulatory e-mails to sift through (and a redesign of the Chicago Photobloggers site to work on), he gave us a couple of minutes.

We were most interested in how he got started collecting found photography. He said he and his sister grew up poor and lived in "crappy" apartment complexes throughout their childhoods. Some of the tenants of these buildings, for whatever reason, tended to move in and out fairly regularly and would many times abandon their possessions in the process. He said that at the end of each month there would be a pile of this abandoned stuff and to him and his sister it "was like Christmas every month."

He remembers one particular "Christmas" morning he came upon ten photos from what must have been a carnival worker's apartment. "They were these insane shots. I kept those." Ever since, his sisters and cousins would bring him photography they'd found and thought he'd like. He then turned it into a hobby.

Now he finds his photography at the garage sales, estate sales and flea markets he frequents looking for artwork. He makes his living "doing a number of things", but lately he concentrates on buying and selling artwork. Just last April he began putting the found photos online.

The NYT article ends with an e-mail quote from a man asking Slattery where he'd found a picture of him and a friend (wearing a Hello Kitty costume) taken in Houston over twenty years ago. He didn't want Slattery to take it down, he was just amazed that the photo had found its way to an auction in Illinois. This man was the first, and so far the only, person to contact Ron about one of the photos on his site, but with the NYT exposure he thinks he'll probably hear from others. Though he's not too worried about anyone asking him to take a picture down. "I don't put up the bad photos. I put things up that have something fun, something big or something happy in them." When asked what he had photos of that he considered "bad" he said, "Let's just say some people do some interesting things that they take pictures of."

Slattery also runs slats.org where he posts photos he takes in and around Chicago. Also, as we mentioned, he helps with the Chicago Photobloggers site and is currently helping to organize three photography shows for the site here in Chicago. Check their site regularly for details.