From The Vault Of Art Shay: Nothing Without Great Labor
By Art Shay in News on Sep 5, 2013 4:00PM
To improve the coordination of their pole-climbing personnel my client, Consumer Power Company of Michigan, a few years ago set up a series of poles and paid their workers and me to hone their skills on company time.
![To improve the coordination of their pole-climbing personnel my client, Consumer Power Company of Michigan, a few years ago set up a series of poles and paid their workers and me to hone their skills on company time.]()
For some reason this Wabash Avenue skyscraper painter always reminded me of an ancient mariner embarked on an orange sea of endless steel.
![For some reason this Wabash Avenue skyscraper painter always reminded me of an ancient mariner embarked on an orange sea of endless steel.]()
In North Carolina, a few classy assembly line ladies expressing their own aesthetics in swank hairdos and colorful blouses, complacently sew men's white T-shirts on an eternal line.
![In North Carolina, a few classy assembly line ladies expressing their own aesthetics in swank hairdos and colorful blouses, complacently sew men's white T-shirts on an eternal line.]()
On Wabash Avenue, under the "L," a painter cheerily ends his day ready for a shower at home and a change of clothes for tomorrow.
![On Wabash Avenue, under the "L," a painter cheerily ends his day ready for a shower at home and a change of clothes for tomorrow.]()
In Tanganyika, before it became Tanzania, taxidermist Paul Zimmerman, working with Willi de Beer, a renegade animal catcher of the Suid Afrikaan diamond family, who became the best animal catcher in East Africa, demonstrates how not to lose his head completely. Those big cats you used to watch "leap" from the trees on unsuspecting Europeans and barely clad babes in safari movies? They were usually stuffed and launched after-death by Kikuyu "boys" working for six bucks a month.
![In Tanganyika, before it became Tanzania, taxidermist Paul Zimmerman, working with Willi de Beer, a renegade animal catcher of the Suid Afrikaan diamond family, who became the best animal catcher in East Africa, demonstrates how not to lose his head completely. Those big cats you used to watch "leap" from the trees on unsuspecting Europeans and barely clad babes in safari movies? They were usually stuffed and launched after-death by Kikuyu "boys" working for six bucks a month.]()
My restless eye, on a factory shoot for Fortune in a western suburb, couldn't resist the wildly pleasing composition afforded by man, fire, color and labor.
![My restless eye, on a factory shoot for Fortune in a western suburb, couldn't resist the wildly pleasing composition afforded by man, fire, color and labor.]()
With two Seth Thomas wall clocks affirming the temporal start and progress of a firstborn's labor—tiny legs visible emerging from mama—a skilled team of seven assistants helps a laboring mama bring a new girl (now 30!) into the world in a west side hospital. These pictures and others mostly for Life, Time and Fortune, I've made of fellow and sister laborers, will be exhibited at the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering in Summer 2014.
![With two Seth Thomas wall clocks affirming the temporal start and progress of a firstborn's labor—tiny legs visible emerging from mama—a skilled team of seven assistants helps a laboring mama bring a new girl (now 30!) into the world in a west side hospital. These pictures and others mostly for Life, Time and Fortune, I've made of fellow and sister laborers, will be exhibited at the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering in Summer 2014.]()
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art shares some of his favorite labor photos.)
One of the few things I learned in my year at Brooklyn College—before I transferred to a heavy bomber in WWII to save our little world for all of you unappreciative dorks and your offspring—was to translate a little Latin, specifically to catch the meaning of the Latin inscription probably still gracing one of the lesser gates: "Nil sine magno labore.." "Nothing without great labor."
It was a phrase probably tossed off originally by one of those early Greek geniuses in a bleached toga and white curly hair, whose classroom was a few logs and rocks outdoors near the Acropolis site and who worried incessantly, like Socrates, that his latest flirty wife with showy tits and a come-on-in classic Greek profile, was being bedded in her spare time by one of his several straight students with a surfeit of testosterone.
Why thoughts of labor should screen up for me in this Labor Day week of $100 million football and baseball contracts—even a soccer player or two—and poor Tiger Woods laboring a whole weekend for $19,000, is an open question.
I have no real answers, except to display a few of my favorite labor images.
Published with permission.
If you can't wait until this time every week 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.
