From The Vault Of Art Shay: On 'Finding Vivian Maier' And Street Photographers

By Art Shay in News on May 13, 2014 4:10PM

Self portrait by Vivian Maier, courtesy of The Jeffery Goldstein Collection.

Marcel Marceau was my friend and Nelson Algren's friend and he liked to poke fun at his friends. Algren and I once escorted him to a grungy pool hall where, as part of his notebook, he studied the body language of a pool hustler. That night he did a hilarious four-minute version at his Civic Opera House performance, on cue. Invisible cue, that is.

Chicago photographers have always been a joyous bunch. Here, in 1955, we all raided the Coronet Films wardrobe and emerged as 17th Century noblemen, associates of the Dutch scientist Von Guericke, whose recreative actor was re-doing the famous experiment in which Von Guericke proved that a metal sandwich of two cymbals could not be pried apart even with two teams of horses tugging at them in opposite directions.

My mentor, Francis Reeves Miller, Life's greatest unsung photographer. Probably because he resembled W.C. Fields and drank a bit too much. He taught me the art of shooting with hidden cameras.

My pre-Olympics leap was just a way of keeping up with champion Kathy Johnson.

Iconic lensman Dave Phillips has the largest historic glass plate collection in the Midwest. He also created a seamless 34-foot mural from the existing plates made in 1871 of the Great Chicago Fire. A master technician, he does stuff like buy US surplus aerial cameras and convert them to fit into the fighter planes of some South American republics. He also has negatives of most vaudeville acts that played Chicago.

Chicago's premier portrait and commercial fotog, Sandro (Miller) -some accounts: Coke, Pepsi, UPS and Nikon. Here, in his large studio he is being interviewed by yet another directorial Siskel about a secret project.

A big league photo groupie- who's done a fine book on Paris- fractional Chicago Bear owner Mike McCaskey. He is a student of my son Richard.

Master photographer and my friend, Charlie Osgood, long time anchorman of the Trib staff, at an exhibition of his work for "Sidewalks II", his classic Chicago book written by Rick Kogan.

Another Chicago creative master and fashion photographer extrodinaire, Jack Perno, who was once Montgomery Ward's chief photographer. He is also one of the best traditional photo printers in the area. He did a recent Chicago Magazine fashion cover and inside photo essay.

My son Richard Shay, one of Chicago's busiest commercial fotogs covering me getting the Silver Camera Award-Photographer of the Year- 2014 --from the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

In 1968, the accommodating new Democrat candidate, Hubert H. Humphrey goes back to Washington from O'Hare.

At my opening at Ann Nathan's gallery in January, some of my fans played paparazzi with me.

In 1971, Life Magazine not only printed the picture and text of my death threat- they ran full page ads in 10 newspapers across the country with a big picture and large type underlining the threat. Life offered me round the clock police protection. The crank calls were voluminous.

(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 weighs in on the posthumous success of Vivian Maier.)

As the acknowledged surviving dean of Chicago photographers, I am asked, almost daily, if I ever knew Vivian Maier, ever slept with her, what do I think of her work and what do I think of the movie.

In reverse order I think Finding Vivian Maier is very good, if a little too street-corner psychological. Rich Cahan, the brilliant creator of many books on photography, including a compendious book of Maier 's photographs; Charlie Siskel, the documentary film's co-director; and John Maloof, who stumbled on and quixotically bought most of her abandoned negatives at a junk and antique auction house for just under 400 bucks—all, are to be commended for their (as it turned out) profitable labors and enthusiasm. Happily, I never slept with her. She hated men and was violent and even though it never came up, I'd be frightened of her heavy Rolleiflex dropping on my small Leica.

The movie is a hit in Chicago, people in galleries across the world are buying prints, and Maloof (making a face) as he grumps in the movie, is still trying to get a foothold for her work in the art world. He disparages that world for their as-usual blindness, but the Wall Street Journal has given him hope-digital printing and camera work, they aver, will obviate the desire of serious collectors to collect vintage prints done by the makers of the pictures--who are not necessarily good darkroom technicians. A foothold that has so far eluded the pushy team. The advances in digital printing, the WSJ avers, will somewhat level the playing field for unknowns who never used an enlarger or saw a print develop in a tray of Dektol.

The two biggest photo galleries in Chicago, both turned down Maloof's original pitch.

As a photographer, four years older than poor deceased Vivian (who had no published pictures), I'm 30,000 published pictures ahead of her. I mean every few years a dead photographer pops up to compete with me. So being a competitive person, I'm just now working with a seasoned documentary crew, aiming at Sundance, on a film about my own verrk and colorful career. They've photographed me at 3 openings so far, and dragged me back to my boyhood home in the Bronx, where my kid brothers pointed out to the camera the exact place I was batting in the 40s when I hit the very first tennis ball used in stickball, 300 feet away and five stories high, onto the roof of James Monroe High School. I can only utter modestly discreet platitudes about Vivian's admirable success, and deny that I'm jealous of a successful if weird competitor who took nice saleable snapshots.

Meanwhile, you're all welcome to come to this living photographer's opening show of industrial pictures, mostly from my Fortune magazine work, at the beautiful new Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, 1000 N. Broadway, Milwaukee. I'll be interviewed live at 7 p.m. At the opening, admission and parking are free. It will be up through August 17. 414-277-2300.

Don't miss "My Florence" which closes May 24, at the Columbia College Library sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Photography - Chicago. I'm also proud to announce that I will be (finally) exhibiting my work at the Art Institute Of Chicago sometime in 2015.

If you can't get enough of Art Shay's words and photos, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.