From The Vault Of Art Shay: On Photographing Women
My daughter Jane with newly minted Smithie Celeste in cap and gown.\r\n
From my ongoing coverage of women in the worlds they occupy, here\'s a telephoto view that—\<em\>Fortune\<\/em\> magazine didn\'t use—of a woman in labor at the Cleveland Clinic. \r\n
A new mother and son in Chicago. This photo was first published by Blue Cross.\r\n
Several doctor-collectors of my pictures have this one hanging in their offices. It shows a big sister removing a speck from her kid brother\'s eye. A medical pun if you please, on healing.\r\n
A prominent but bucolic mama teaches her daughter the intricacy of casting in an Indiana river.\r\n
At the first Gaslight Club on Walton Street in Chicago, I covered the not-quite-in-synch ladies of the line for \<em\>Holiday\<\/em\> magazine. The editor eschewed this picture and instead used a full page of a drunken banker gaping at the famous sign Gaslight bought from the heirs of the Everleigh madams. Something about entering a pleasure area in the (really gay) 90s of two centuries or so back.\r\n
On an NBC safari in Tanzania for Marlin Perkins\' vaunted \<em\>Zooparade\<\/em\> program, writer Dorothy Terry luxuriates in a canvas tub. Would you believe the \<em\>Sport Illustrated\<\/em\> editors wanted to know if the lady had a bathing suit on! I never gossip about stuff like that.\r\n
I was teaching Pat, a friend\'s wife, how to use her camera, when I could see this picture coming together from 50 yards away. I grabbed the camera and made three quick frames, one of them ending up as the cover of my \<em\>Animals\<\/em\> book. Pat\'s main interest was design anyway. She forgave me. \r\n
In Gastonia, North Carolina colorfully clad assembly line workers made white pillowcases by the hundreds.\r\n
I used to be a special fotog for Oprah, whom I covered for \<em\>TV Guide\<\/em\> early on. While I was in Europe, a stupid agent I used to employ sold my outtakes to a publishing company without asking Oprah or me for permission. The publisher, equally unscrupulous, used the pictures in an unauthorized gossip book. Oprah and her manager were properly pissed off, and a few weeks later when a magazine assigned me to do another cover on Oprah, she had the pleasure of telling them \"I\'ll pose for anyone but Art Shay.\" I deserved her scorn. Years later, the shoe was sort of on the other foot. Despite my objection, Diana Ross used 13 of my \<em\>Life\<\/em\> pictures in her biography. My daughter Jane helped me find a Chicago law firm to represent me.\r\n
Here\'s an all-night beauty shop on Ashland Avenue in Chicago that Algren and I liked a lot. We agreed that the bubble-hairdos were the images women thought themselves to be. We knew the dumpy lady on the right was what most women really look like. I believe that combining these two ideas in one frame is the job of the fotog working at his best. I try to make this clear to would-be photographers.\r\n
She never went to Smith College, but her independence is quite clear. You touch anything belonging to her or in her temporary apartment and she won\'t hesitate to use that stick. A couple of years ago I made the mistake of hiring a New York freelance editor to help gather some of my pictures into a book. When I saw this picture on top of her reject pile I fired her immediately. Where could I find a better image of a tough lady fighting for dignity? Those expertly sewn doggie skirts! They brought tears to one of my tougher collectors, imagining this life.\r\n
The Art Director of the University of Illinois Press, which wanted to use this picture in my first photography book, sent a message to me through my editor. Said his memo: \"Tell Art Shay if he wants to stop the woman\'s action completely, next time he should use a faster shutter speed.\" I somehow scrupled to thank this well-intentioned asshole without insulting him. Without explaining that I\'d used fast shutter speeds for \<em\>Time\<\/em\>, \<em\>Life\<\/em\> and \<em\>SI\<\/em\> when he was in diapers. \r\n
A Warsaw washerwoman misplaced by the Gods to Ashland Avenue by Lake Street helps pay her husband\'s nightly two-buck bill on Division Street for Chicago-made Polish gin. Algren liked to think she was related to the landlady Dostoevsky had Raskolnikov murdered in \<em\>Crime and Punishment.\<\/em\> To see if he could get away with it.\r\n
(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 takes a look at the fairer sex.)
The campus of Smith College is officially known as a Botanical Garden. Why not? The lovely and famous institution, one of the noted "Seven Sisters" group, is a school for 2,588 independent minded women and was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead who designed Central Park in New York, just three hours away, and numerous gardens in Boston, closer at hand.
My grand-daughter Celeste Bianca Lavin graduated from Smith Sunday. I would have loved being there, but couldn't make it. Celeste's favorite aunt, my daughter Jane Shay Wald—a noted trademark attorney—flew into Northhampton, Mass. to share the joy and sent me a graduation snapshot by my other daughter, Lauren, Celeste's journalist mother. Lauren and Carl Lavin (Celeste's dad) have just moved to Atlanta where he, a former New York Times editor, has begun a new job: editor of CNN's home page.
Jane helpfully sent me actress Jane Lynch's smashing commencement address, saying it was the best she'd ever heard. An Emmy winner, a beauty, and funny, the star of Glee called the graduating class "an elite and powerful group of game-changing women." She acknowledged that she wasn't doing much more than making a speech for her treasured honorary Smith degree, but she claimed special knowledge of the Smith grads because, "My beautiful wife Lara Embry graduated from Smith in 1991 and we were married in Northhampton. Her experience here was transformative." And what's more, she was expecting to enroll her young daughter in Smith in ten or so years.
Lynch drew much applause, but the audience especially liked her comparing real life to improv theater. "You are fiercely independent, you are wickedly smart, trailblazing, uber-confident and shockingly entitled. Like I told you, I live with one of you!" Brought down the "house" gathered in an Olmstead garden in bright Sunday sunshine two days ago.
Before Celeste's graduation I had thought to do a blog on the steady advance of women. Here it is.
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.
