Chicago's South Side, 1946-1948 (Volume 1)

By Wayne F. Miller, Gordon Parks, Robert B. Stepto

Book Overview

Wayne Miller's photographs chronicle a black Chicago of fifty years ago: the South Side community that burgeoned as thousands of African Americans, almost exclusively from the South, settled in the city during the Great Migration of the World War II years. The black-and-white images provide a visual history of Chicago at the height of its industrial order--when the stockyards, steel mills, and factories were booming--but, more important, they capture the intimate moments in the daily lives of ordinary people. Miller was adept at becoming invisible, and his photographs are full of naked, disarming emotion.

One of the first Western photographers to document the destruction of Hiroshima and the survivors of the bombing, Wayne Miller had just returned from his stint as a World War II Navy combat photographer under the direction of Edward Steichen when he received two concurrent Guggenheim fellowships to fund his Chicago project. Taken over a course of three years beginning in 1946, his photographs span city scenes from storefront church services to slaughterhouse workers in the taverns at night to a couple making love. In addition to affording a glimpse into the hopes and hardships shared by a community of migrants who had just made the long journey from the rural South to the urban North, the images collected in Chicago's South Side reflect the enormous variety of human experiences and emotions that occurred at a unique time and place in the American landscape.

A few celebrities appear in these images--Paul Robeson, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington. But mostly we see ordinary people--in clubs and at church, sporting events, parades. Much is on view that is of interest to the student of mid-twentieth-century black Chicago: the neighborhoods Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas traversed in Native Son, the Bronzeville limned in Gwendolyn Brooks's earliest poems, and the street life that inspired the urbanscapes of painter Archibald Motley. The kitchenette apartments that Miller so deftly memorializes are bursting with people of all ages sleeping, dressing, courting, and dreaming. One senses the intimacy between his subjects and the emotions that animate their lives.

Gordon Parks's memoir of poverty and hope in the freezing tenements of the South Side supplements the photographs, while Robert Stepto's essay contextualizes the South Side in the history of postwar Chicago. Chicago's South Sideis a superb testament to the talent of the photographer, to the spirit of the people the images portray, and to the moment in American history these photographs capture.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520223160
• ISBN13: 9780520223165
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 127 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.8" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Shocking and Intimate

This book is a treasure. I wish I could find more by this photographer (my searches have come up empty). The photographs take you right inside each scene, and often pack a powerful punch of sadness, joy, intimacy, life. The printing quality is excellent. If the publisher can collect more of his work, I will be the first customer.

Marvelous collection of images

This is a marvelous collection of images from everyday Balck Chicago life in the late 1940s. There are scenes of street life, back alleys, patrons at a pool hall and tavern, and night life ranging from a female personator dressing to Duke Ellington hunched at a piano at rehearsal and an ebullient Louis Jordan on stage.

Brilliant, passionate photography

This is one of the best photographic books I've seen -- ever. Wayne Miller manages to make personal contact with the human beings who lived on Chicago's South Side in a way that few photographers have ever matched. The warmth and complexity of these photographs, the compassion and human understanding involved, are most remarkable -- especially since the photographer stood on the other side of America's terrible racial divide from his subjects. Anyone who loves classic documentary photography, or who simply loves human beings in their complexity, should order this book.

A Unique Historical and Photographic Record

Chicago fascinates me, and this is a unique photographic record of a very special period in Chicago's history. Blacks were migrating from the South to Chicago in the hope of finding a better life in the post-war North. Wayne Miller captures ordinary life in this remarkable glimpse into Chicago's South Side. The photos are the sort that you continue studying, noticing increasing detail. Despite the intense racism, the South Side somehow held the prospect of a better tomorrow. I'm delighted Wayne Miller's photos of this important neighborhood made it into print.