ART SHOULD SURPRISE YOU, and then—if all the synapses are firing right—ignite your curiosity.
I’d completely forgotten how jazzed I used to get about photography—that is, until my WordPress (and now Substack) friend Jennifer Stix reminded me in a recent post she published to her WP site (link below in the Notes)1. Jen and her husband Paul (who has launched a music Substack) are lifelong Chicagoland peeps I first encountered when I relaunched the Completely in the Dark blog on WordPress in the late aughts.
I spoke with Jennifer on Wednesday, May 29 via Zoom to get more details on her amazing black and white photos, which she shot as a teenager in the mid-1970s.
Our chat caused me to dig out a couple black and white prints I still have from a late 1970s photography class (definitely before 1980 when our family moved off Lake Minnetonka and out to exurbia). Jennifer and I had some audio difficulties on the Zoom call, so she sent along her commentary, edited for length and clarity.
In the mid-1970s, Jennifer received as a birthday gift a Canon TLb2 by her father, who also shuttled her around the city (one trip in particular to Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood).
For the life of me I can’t recall which make of camera I used, but it likely was passed down from my maternal grandfather, who had to own every new gadget when it hit store shelves and happily shared his old and new “toys” with his grandkids. I’m thinking this was for a community college photography class I took in the fall of 1979, so I probably took the photos earlier that summer.
One of things that struck me about Jennifer’s images was the bold, direct composition and her use of space.
For example:
“Pullman was originally established in the late 1800s,” she says, “as housing for workers employed at the Pullman Palace Car factory. Some have described the complex as one of the Utopian communities that were gaining popularity at the time. In fact it was the opposite. Although the complex was a vibrant one when the railroads were at their apex, having your boss as your landlord, purveyor of dry goods and arbiter of morals and etiquette created an indentured existence for resident employees. By the 1950s the area fell into disrepair as the fates of the railroads were in decline.”
Jennifer described visiting the area with her father: “By the time Dad suggested a photo excursion to the south side neighborhood in 1974, conditions at Pullman were dire. A developer had proposed razing the whole complex to build an office park. Luckily preservationists intervened and had it declared a City of Chicago landmark. This news caught Dad’s attention. Pullman has been gentrifying ever since, and during the pandemic was designated a National Historic Park.”3
Also, apparently, “stoop sitting in the 1970s” was a thing.
Jennifer also spent time photographing around Lincoln Park. Again, omnipresent “stoop sitting” was observed.
Says Jennifer, “Stoop sitting is one of the subjects that appears in lots of my teenage photos. It was ubiquitous. Virtually every neighborhood had unintentional sentries, except Lake Shore Drive and other high-rise dense areas. The variety of people and relationships was dazzling! The family in the photo below were living in the heart of the Lincoln Park neighborhood, which had yet to be gentrified. A Home Depot has replaced the house.”
Just around the corner of Halsted Street was a barbershop on Clark Street.
Back to the idea of composition, and a couple wonderful examples Jennifer posted to WordPress:
In the barbershop photo, what draws me in (outside of the men’s gazes) is the negative space to our right: the empty chair, the artwork on the wall, the calendar, the glaring light above them.
As Jennifer writes, “Clark Street was around the corner from our apartment building in Lincoln Park, and its denizens were a surreal mix of elderly but stout German women pushing grocery-filled shopping carts, drunks staggering from one ‘old man bar’ to the next, steam-table restaurants, beauty salons whose customers still favored sky-high beehives, tailor shops, and finally lots of aging barbershops like the one I shot here.”
Also, in the Michigan Avenue photo, the negative space is now to our left, in the direction the men are looking, at the TV set in the store window. You can almost imagine the conversation: “How do you think they’ll do this year?” “Bears all the way…” That communal warmth of early autumn—maybe a nip in the air, a taste of a new football season, a world getting in sync.
“Construction workers scanning women,” Jennifer adds, “businessmen peering through a fence hole at a construction site and this phenomenon: a cluster of dudes checking out the score through the plate glass window of the Zenith ‘Display Salon’ on Michigan Avenue.”
Asymmetrical composition was something that interested me when I was exploring black and white photography, again from the same photography class as the above exposure test:
The cartoon character’s white smock balances against the black brick building and sky above—nearly everyone I’ve ever shown this photo to has snickered with delight: “Who’s the idiot and what’s he pointing at?”
Signs carried a different weight, it seems, back in the late 20th century. Typography, image, even neon had a distinct visual appeal in the urban landscape.
Jennifer used that in one of her photographic excursions:
In her photo, a woman in cat-eye glasses working at a dry cleaners peers back at this curious teenager with a hefty camera snapping a shot back at her.4
Jennifer reports: “Clark Street again. The dry cleaners were even more ubiquitous than the bars. Photographing people today is very different from what I experienced in the mid-1970s. Part of it was the fearlessness of youth. But there weren’t a lot of teenagers wandering around with an SLR camera, taking photos, so that helped. Plus, I had the ‘cover’ of being a ‘student’ when asked what I was doing. Luckily, everyone who ‘caught me in the act’ was gracious—even if their expression in the finished print wasn’t.”
Somewhere between stacks of “assortment-size” Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and an empty pie shelf, a woman glances over the counter at Jennifer as she records this moment in 1970s downtown Chicago history. I love it because my late father used to take us to buffets and similar cafeterias when I grew up in Indianapolis. In the background, busboys and waitress in uniform shuffle between tables—you can almost hear the clinking and clanking of a busy downtown mealtime.
“My grandmother and I ate here occasionally but she is not in this photo,” Jennifer writes. “Wags was inside the Walgreens drugstore and was a destination for elderly ladies who lived in nearby apartment hotels. I was sitting at the counter, facing a mirror, so the top two-thirds of the photo reflects the activity in the dining room at lunchtime.”
Lastly, Jennifer gives us a parting look at 1974 from the back of a Chicago bus:
“This was the dowager bus,” Jennifer states. “It ran along the lakefront, the inner drive, Michigan Avenue and State Street. Like stoop sitting, the CTA was a study in humanity. Every route—even every ride—had a fresh cast of players, mini-dramas, and interesting views to absorb when all was quiet.”
Two things leapt out at me in this photo: obviously the gentleman glancing back at the camera, but also the head of the bus driver in the mirror at center and foreground blurred shoulder of another passenger. It’s a lovely image!
I’m awed by Jennifer’s photography and grateful she allowed me to share her work with StoryShed’s subscribers and friends on Substack!
Notes
You can follow Jennifer Stix on Instagram: @jacullman
Jennifer Stix’s WordPress site.
The Canon TLb camera was first marketed in the U.S. in Sept. 1974.
Learn more about Chicago’s historic Pullman neighborhood.
Cat-eye glasses were popular in the late 1950s.
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I love the photos, and your commentary. Very nice!
...great photos...great read...chicago is such an aesthetic delight, especially the neighborhoods and architecture (and of course hot dogs)...we need to bring back stoop sitting...