Broughton Quarterly - Fall 2008 - (Page 26) CHICAGO MOMENTS Since moving to Chicago in the 1940s to shoot for Life magazine, photographer Art Shay has chronicled the city moment by moment, readjusting truths and revealing layers of character. BY MIC HAEl MORECI PHOTOS BY ART SHAY sychologist and philosopher William James dubbed it “the specious present.” He was referring to the manner in which people experience time, about the fleeting nature of moments. The specious present, according to James, are those brief periods we don’t pass through, but experience as one lasting, indelible sensation. The before, the now, the after—all blend into a whole, and the impression it leaves is everlasting. Photographer Art Shay has been capturing such moments, such confluences of time, for nearly his entire life. Shay came to Chicago in 1948 after taking a position as a reporter for Life magazine. The job enabled Shay to discover Chicago not only through his camera lens, but through the eyes of his friend and subject, Nelson Algren. Shay’s latest photo collection, Chicago’s Nelson Algren, records the relationship he forged with the National Book Award-wining author, “the prose poet of the Chicago slums.” What began as a photo essay for Life (and was eventually rejected) turned into a 15-year project as Shay documented Algren’s life on the gritty post-World War II streets of Chicago. The book follows Algren through his infamous—though now mostly wrecking-balled and gentrified—haunts on Milwaukee, Ashland, Clark, Madison, and Division. The immigrant slums. What Shay captured in this decade and a half is Algren’s Chicago: the gamblers, the prostitutes, the junkies, the crooks, the disenfranchised. These photos chronicle the city’s poor as Algren himself did in his writing, without guilt or pity. The camera, like Algren’s pen, became an objective chronicler, telling the brutal stories of city life, but also the charm, the humor, and the irony. There are layers to Shay’s photography. Take for example a photo he took of a blacktop leading to an alleyway, where the words “we hate black basters” are scrawled in dirty chalk. The caption reads,“Racial hate and illiteracy often go together in Illinois.” Shay and Algren’s perspective is akin to Shakespeare’s Falstaff: they all understand that tragedy and wit are blood cousins. P 26 broughton Quarterly FALL 2008
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