How Howard Got His History Back
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/howard-simmons-photographer-dave-mata-found-photos/Content?oid=1770313
A young DJ stumbled on a warehouse cache and reunited a
barrier-breaking photographer with some 500 lost works.
By Leah Pietrusiak
May 06, 2010
In the summer of 2007 Dave Mata spotted a crate of records outside a
warehouse in Wicker Park. Mata, a musician and soul DJ, asked the
workers inside if he could buy the vinyl, and also asked about work.
He wound up with three crates of records and a job helping to clear
out the packed space.
In the course of the job, he came across a life-size, full-length,
mounted photograph of a young man with an Afro, his arms folded and
his ankles crossed, leaning against a wall and laughing. "I was like,
'That is one fly-looking dude,'" Mata says. "The dust and years had
yellowed it in a cool way."
Digging into the strata of junk, he found more black-and-white
mounted photos, some of them under a broken-down convertible that was
one of several cars abandoned in the warehouse. He found the young
Jesse Jackson preaching, Dizzy Gillespie playing his trumpet, and
four black men計hotographers apparently, from the cameras on
display貞itting on the concrete front steps of the South Side
Community Art Center. One looked like the laughing dude.
There was a box filled with negatives in labeled envelopes. There
were negatives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., negatives of Abbie
Hoffman, negatives of Lyndon Johnson. Next to this box was another
one that was full of invoices; their letterhead said howard simmons.
"Then it all got too weird," Mata says. "I realized this was all
probably part of a collection. If I had lost my songs, records,
equipment, I would have nothing to show for myself as an artist. And
it seemed that that had happened to someone else."
Mata put the materials aside. He found a Web site for a photographer
named Howard Simmons, and its logo matched the letterhead. The
address was in Oak Park. He called the number. Mata described what he
had found, and the man on the other end exclaimed, "It's like Christmas!"
Simmons had bought the warehouse in 1987 and turned half of it into a
photography studio. It was where he'd shot ads for Schlitz Malt
Liquor and Luster hair products. But it became a financial burden,
and in 1990 a contractor who was already occupying the unrenovated
half took over the entire building. Simmons cleared out, removing his
equipment and all his significant negatives觔r so he thought. Later
he tried to collect the rest of his things but the contractor didn't
want to let him back in. Thinking none of it was all that important,
Simmons didn't force the issue. He didn't realize the value of what
he'd left behind until Mata returned it.
Mata discovered the life-size laughing man was Simmons himself, a
self-portrait he'd taken with a timer. He'd taken the picture of the
four photographers the same way; it had been used to promote "Through
Eyes of Blackness," a 1973 exhibition at the South Side Community Art
Center by four of the first African-American staff photographers at
metro Chicago newspapers. They were John White of the Daily News,
Ovie Carter of the Tribune, and from the Sun-Times Bob Black and
Simmons himself. Many of the mounted photographs Mata retreived were
from this exhibit.
"The show was symbolic of a situation we never thought would be
possible," says Black, who was hired by the Sun-Times in 1968. "The
civil rights leaders were beginning to impress upon the media
organizations that if you really want to cover our situation and the
community, you need people who come from that community. . . . We'd
broken the barriers of the newspapers downtown."
"The exhibit was Howard's brainchild," Black says. "He realized it
was a historical situation. . . . He spearheaded everything, from the
printing to the funding."
The warehouse stash also contained some of Simmons's later commercial
work: head shots of John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony; a proof sheet
of Michael Jordan pictures taken for a 1987 Coca-Cola campaign; a
picture of Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, as it appeared in
a print ad for a 1985 Channel Five retrospective on his murder; young
Channel Five reporters Warner Saunders and Mark Giangreco posing with
some of the '84 Cubs at Wrigley Field.
In his Oak Park living room recently, Simmons, now 66, rummaged
through boxes of old negatives that were new to him again: Mayor
Richard J. Daley; Cook County assessor P.J. Cullerton, of the
long-running Chicago political dynasty; his wife, Marva, when they
first met over 40 years ago. James Brown, the godfather of soul. "I
can't believe I forgot that I shot James Brown," Simmons said,
shaking his head. "I shot so many people and so many places, so many
times衫an."
Simmons grew up in Pittsburgh. His parents didn't have much money,
the family moved around a lot, and Howard and his sister found
themselves sometimes sleeping with bedbugs. But he remembers his
childhood as happy. He built model trains with his dad, who liked to
screen movies for the neighborhood kids.
In 1962, after high school, Simmons enlisted in the air force and
spent the next four years playing the French horn in service bands.
During his hitch in the military he was bitten by the photography
bug. He bought an Asahi Pentax SLR in the Philippines, read up, and
began shooting arrangements he made in the barracks of Gillette
razors and bottles of Aqua Velva aftershave. "I would try to make
simulated ads. It was very primitive背 was just learning," Simmons
says. "There was something about spending time assembling an image as
opposed to spontaneously capturing it."
Leaving the air force in 1966, Simmons went to work in the photo lab
of an ad agency in Pittsburgh. "I was excited because I wanted to
become a commercial photographer," Simmons says. "They said it would
happen, but it never did."
Even so, he built a portfolio. It consisted of high-style images he'd
shoot on his lunch break觔ne was a woman's reflection in a jeweler's
window苔nd self-directed photo-journalism, including pictures of
civil rights demonstrations in Pittsburgh. In the summer of 1967 he
showed up with his portfolio, but no appointment, at Ebony's offices
in Chicago.
"I had never worked as a professional photographer anywhere," Simmons
says. "I just came from working in a photo lab in Pittsburgh, and I'd
never gone to school. And I'm just thinking虹t took a lot of gall to do that."
John Johnson hired him on the spot.
Simmons covered Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta in 1968 and a
few weeks later photographed his somber widow, Coretta Scott King, at
a rally in D.C. That portrait, featured in "Through Eyes of
Blackness," was lost to Simmons until Mata came across it in the warehouse.
Simmons left Ebony later in 1968, though one of his photographs of
King speaking would show up on the cover in 1970. He and Marva were
starting a family, and after he asked for a raise but didn't get it,
his friend Bob Black told him the Sun-Times wanted to hire a second
black photographer. Spot news wasn't necessarily what Simmons
considered his calling, but he applied for the job and got it.
Simmons's artistic approach to photography was apparent even when he
shot news. Black recalls one of Simmons's assignments: an el train
had derailed along the Dan Ryan. His pockets stuffed with film,
Simmons sneaked onto the toppled train, got low, and began shooting
pictures up and out through a broken window. "People are going out in
ambulances and firemen were coming in, and I was able to get a
silhouette of a fireman and the helicopter coming down from that
perspective," Simmons says.
Black says, "He would always make a shot have a different look than
something shot on the fly."
When Simmons left the Sun-Times in 1976 to pursue commercial
photography, he tried to persuade his friends to join him, but Black,
Carter, and White would remain photojournalists until they retired.
By then Simmons had three children to support, and the move meant
leaving behind the security of a staff job, but he'd had enough of
news. The photographers are often the first on the scene, he says,
and the outcome isn't always heroic. Simmons recalls a man who tried
to rescue girls trying to get out of a burning building, but there
were burglar bars on the windows. "It's different if you go to a
funeral, that's rough enough," Simmons says. "But when you're there
when it's happening背 couldn't be crying at work."
Simmons compares the news photographer to a gunslinger in the old
west: "A gunslinger can't pull out his gun and aim虹t's gotta be
automatic. Your camera and your exposure and composition虹t all has
to be automatic. Before being at the paper, I didn't think of
photojournalists being as bad as they are苑ad, of course, being good."
He and Black were looking through some old pictures one day when
Black exclaimed, "Oh look, that's John Drummond!" Simmons caught
Drummond, a legendary Channel Two crime reporter, standing at the
door of the mayor's office, peering in, the entire City Hall press
corps jamming the hallway behind him. Simmons called the 1972 photo
Where's Mayor Daley? The Illinois delegation Daley led hadn't been
seated at that year's Democratic National Convention, and Daley had
dropped out of sight while the convention went on without him. This
was the day he was expected back, and he kept the press corps waiting
almost three hours. Just as Simmons had figured out that one of the
best shots of the train wreck was from inside the train, he knew the
best shot of the vigil at the mayor's door was from inside the
office. "I just happened to step out at the right time," Simmons
says. "It almost looks like it was set up."
As a studio photographer, he delighted in making orchestrated
situations look real: To promote a Channel Five feature on
homelessness, he was commissioned to photograph a bag lady. "We
couldn't find one in time, so we got a model, got some bags, some
raggedy clothes, and we had our bag lady," Simmons says. "Carol Marin
said, 'Where'd you find her? I want to interview her.'"
"Did you see the taverns I built?" he asks. Shooting an ad campaign
for Stroh's, he created an African-American bar, a Latino bar, and a
white bar觔ne for each market.
To this day he'll spend hours setting up a shoot, and he'll be so
focused on what he's doing that he won't even listen to music.
Simmons's favorite studio was an old fish warehouse on Chicago Avenue
that he bought in 1983. The place "just reeked," he says; he used
lemon juice to get the smell out. (Lemon juice is the commercial
photographer's friend, says Simmons: for instance, it also keeps
apples from turning brown when they sit out for a long time at a food
shoot.) Simmons turned that River North space into a
5,000-square-foot, two-floor showplace with hardwood floors, a
drive-in dock, a kitchen in which to prepare food for shoots, a
darkroom, dressing rooms, office space, and a monster
six-by-eight-foot soft box that he mounted to a track on the ceiling
and called Jabba.
A soft box is an apparatus that throws a broad, even light, and it's
a necessity for a commercial photographer. Simmons built his first
one in the late 70s when he picked up an assignment from Burrell, a
prominent African-American ad agency. "It was a difficult place to
get into負hey were using mainly white photographers at the time," he says.
His commercial career got off to a promising start, with regular work
from Vince Cullers. "Vince Cullers had the first black advertising
agency in the country," Simmons says. "I owe so much to Vince. He
told me everything about the biz. I knew nothing. He told me what to
charge, and he gave me work." It was good work, and on primary
accounts范ears, Illinois Bell, Kellogg's.
Simmons also shot the first cover for Black Family Magazine, which
was launched in Chicago in 1980. A few years later, Eunice Johnson,
the wife of Ebony's John Johnson, invited him to shoot fashion
designs in Paris; some of these images were published in the magazine
to promote the traveling Ebony Fashion Fair, an annual event. Simmons
was the first non-Paris-based photographer the company used for that task.
Bob Black says mainstream newspapers finally began covering black
stories when race became news they could no longer ignore. One of the
most important of those stories was the open-casket funeral of Emmett
Till, the 14-year-old Chicago boy murdered in 1955 in Mississippi.
"Before that, it was as if black people didn't exist," Black says.
"But Emmett Till's mother was so intent on having the world see what
had happened to her son. It was too dynamic to ignore."
Yet years more would pass before mainstream media outlets, under
pressure from civil rights leaders, began integrating their ranks.
According to a 1981 issue of Jet magazine, John Tweedle became the
first black staff photographer at any major American metropolitan
daily when he joined the Chicago Daily News in 1964. Black and
Simmons were hired in 1968, White and Carter a year later. "There
hasn't been a surge like that since," says Black, who retired in 2006.
But the commercial photo industry didn't feel the same social
imperative, and eventually, Simmons says, he felt the effects of the
difference.
He thought, for instance, that a mid-80s photo shoot with Michael
Jordan for McDonald's had nailed down a partnership with the giant
Leo Burnett agency. Because of a scheduling conflict involving the
basketball court, he had less than two hours at the Bulls practice
site to shoot Jordan in four scenarios觔ne of them dunking the ball,
another holding a hamburger. All four required their own settings,
outfits, and lighting arrangements. There was a food stylist to be
consulted. Simmons remembers that as Jordan dunked for the camera, a
catering crew waited at the edge of the court to roll out carpet for
the next event.
"The perspiration was just dripping," he says. "I'd never shot under
that much stress. But I pulled it off. I said, 'I know I'm in now. I
know Leo Burnett is gonna be my client.' But something happened, and
I didn't get more work." Simmons says, "Sometimes [agencies] would
say, 'Your work's too ethnic,' because I had mostly black faces. But
what's the difference虹t's more challenging to light black skin than
it is white skin.
"If I could've broken in I'd still have that studio on Chicago
Avenue. I put everything back into my work. I never spent money on
fancy clothes or cars. I don't gamble, smoke, or drink. There was a
point where things were really moving. But business just didn't
advance as I'd hoped."
When he gave up the Wicker Park warehouse in 1990 he moved briefly to
a loft in the South Loop. But since the early 90s he hasn't had his own studio.
After Mata reunited him with the images he hadn't seen in more than
20 years, a longtime colleague, designer Pam Rice, invited him to
show some of his works, old and new, alongside her paintings in
Bronzeville this weekend. "That'll be in there," he says, motioning
to a framed photo on his living room wall of Martin Luther King. So
will a shot from "Through Eyes of Blackness" of a toddler peering out
of a shack in Mississippi, and the portrait of Walter Payton that the
Sun-Times used on its front page when Payton died in 1999. "Should I
put Herbie in?" he wonders, studying a digital image of Herbie
Hancock on his laptop.
Marva and their daughters gave Simmons his first digital camera in
2003, and Black and Victor Powell, another of Chicago's few black
studio photographers, showed him how to use it. "Over the years,"
Simmons says, "African-American photographers have been very
supportive of one another. Because, I suppose, there aren't that many
of us苔nd that's from editorial to commercial. Victor was really
instrumental in helping me get into and understand digital
photography. He'll always say, 'Come on down, man, get on the
computer [at his studio].' And he's the master of Photoshop, he's the wizard."
A profile of Harold Washington laughing is in the mix for the
Bronzeville show. "Good old Harold," Simmons says. So is a print of
James Brown made from one of the negatives that Mata returned to him.
"I got a Superfly guy with his cane and big hat衍ook at that
Cadillac," says Simmons. He shot that one on 47th Street in the
1960s, with a Harold's Chicken in the background. He wonders aloud if
it's artsy enough, and if anyone would buy it.
If he hadn't left the Sun-Times, Simmons says, he could have retired
by now, like Bob Black, and he'd have more money. "But I have no
regrets," he says, "Photography didn't make me rich but it put me in
touch with some amazing people. If I was smart I would've gone into
real estate!"
No matter who or what else he was shooting, Simmons always documented
his family. "I have mostly black-and-white photos苔ll journalistic
style, not posed," he says. He even photographed his wife in labor
with their first of three daughters. "I told her, 'Just a minute,'"
he says. "I put the camera on top of the car, put it on a self-timer,
and had us walking to the hospital. It's a great shot."
Marva, a retired schoolteacher, laughs. "I was used to him pulling
out his camera," she says, "but he'd stop every two or three steps
and I'm in pain."
Simmons continues to shoot the most famous people of his time. He
photographed Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey at a Women for Obama
event and Barack Obama himself at a fund-raiser when he ran for
president. But a recent picture that Simmons picked for the
Bronzeville exhibit is nothing like those. It's of a ragged line of
colorful newspaper boxes, shot from an el platform. "I looked down
and saw all the little boxes, and then a lady walked by with her
little red scarf苞lick," he says. "That's why I like to keep a camera
on me. It's a good feeling when that one element comes by. Makes the shot."
And it's painful, he says, when you see the shot but don't have a
camera on you. "Or if you lose the negatives, or don't have your
images backed up and your computer crashes虹t's like being in a
darkroom and your film gets exposed. It's a fleeting moment.
"And then there are those moments when you don't realize what you've
lost," he says. "When people find your images, like Dave did, and get
them back to you. He brought back my past. You can't put a price tag
on that."
.
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