From The Vault of Art Shay: Couples For All Seasons

By Art Shay in News on Feb 8, 2012 7:00PM

A few blocks away and a few decades back on Clark Street, this couple left their drinks inside and fed their stronger appetites for each other outside. My archivist Erica, somewhat enigmatically adds, \"I love that this says entrance but suggests romance on the door.\"

A pretty young Hugh Hefner interests a pretty, young Bunny in the master\'s key to an empire aborning in his very first Playboy Club in Chicago.

Sex and food often combine on the stage, as this lead couple does in \<em\>The Food Chain\<\/em\>, directed by the great Ina Marlowe. In their caloric coupling they ignore the spaghetti in their kitchen.

This interracial couple crosses an intersection near Belmont Avenue with real feeling during a Chicago Pride Parade.

My mother called the whirligig on the table a \"fly-birdie\" for my 3-year-old ears. Its slow response to the slight Evanston park wind off the lake perfectly suits a mature romance. What they do next, and where, is a job for a Chicago storyteller like Joe Epstein or Saul Bellow. I did my part just picturing the couple on a quiet Sunday.

One of my favorite couples is Shirley and Russell Ventilator, condemned to watch the follies of Chicago affectionately together from their airy rooftop perch near North Avenue.

My beautiful wife Florence, a rare book dealer born on Valentine\'s Day, hosted a crowded book signing for my first book on Nelson Algren. I should have bought a pile of them as an investment... signed, of course. Check those waistlines: mine from being a nationally rated racquetball player; hers from fencing.

(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 is in a romantic mood for Valentine's Day.)

My wife was born on Valentine's Day, leaving me with the puzzling annual task of buying one or two presents. Fortunately my life's work of picturing the world I so fleetingly inhabit is full of couples: animate and inanimate; pairs and spares; much more photogenic than singletons. As I said in the intro to my Animals book, the noun "couples" — not to mention its sexy cousin, "coupling" — has always fascinated our prime icon makers: painters; writers; movie producers and photographers; Ovid's passionate pairs; God making contact with Man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; Lady Murasaki's sexy Samurai coupling with ingeniously athletic geishas under kimonos; American Gothic; Bonnie and Clyde; King Kong and his tiny serial consorts Fay Wray then Jessica Lange; Laurel and Hardy; Romeo and Juliet... the sacrilegious couplings in Balzac's Contes Drolatique. All build up to Alfred Eisenstaedt's sailor kissing girl on VJ Day in Times Square.

Why couples? Because for artists and wannabes, that's where the action is. The songwriter had it right. One is the loneliest number. Need I drag in our founding couple? "God saw that man was lonely so He..." I've come to think of Adam and Eve as Eden-ical twins joined incestuously at the rib, a couple sardonically coupled forever. Like most couples, they're also coupled for better and for worse. Here followeth some of my favorite own couples.

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, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.