Richard Cahan and Michael Williams
When Thu 11/30, 5 PM
Info 312-922-3432
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The story of Richard Nickel’s tragic end often overshadows his work. He was born in 1928 to a working-class family; his father drove a truck, his mother was a factory worker. After a stint in the army, he used his GI Bill benefits to enroll in the Institute of Design, which turned out not to be a vocational school, but an offshoot of the New Bauhaus, founded in Chicago in 1937 to teach the curriculum of the original German Bauhaus, the modernist bastion that had been shuttered by the Nazis. There Nickel’s talent with a camera was recognized and encouraged by legendary photographers Aaron Siskind and, especially, Harry Callahan.
Just months after Nickel’s discovery, the Knisely store and flats were demolished. The pattern was set. Even as he was cataloging Sullivan’s buildings, they were being wantonly torn down. Through his photographs and activism, Nickel became Chicago’s most eloquent spokesman for architectural preservation. He worked tirelessly to stop the 1961 demolition of Sullivan’s Garrick Theater, which was spending its last days as a movie house. Nickel would go to the day’s final screening and stay until morning photographing the details of the beautiful arched auditorium. In the end, the building was destroyed for a parking garage. You can see some of the busts that adorned its facade above the entrance to Second City
In Nickel’s architectural photos, which make up the rest of the book, the presence of people contributes to the power of the structures. Most architectural photography is an offshoot of fashion and marketing–heroic shots that flatter egos and can’t often be replicated in real life. Here, the soaring height of the lost concourse at Union Station, implied indirectly in the thin perforated steel columns rising out of frame, seems more fully embodied in the posture of an elderly man in a crisply pressed suit. He’s standing apart as ramrod erect as a sentry and counterpointed by a stout man in the foreground straightening his necktie in a vending machine mirror. You see only one small corner of that great space in this photograph, but it gives you a truer feeling of it than all those wide-angle shots that try to take in everything in a single glance.
Richard Nickel’s Chicago poignantly conveys what we’ve lost and captures the enduring beauty of what’s still here to save, from the Rookery and the Monadnock right down to their modernist successors, the John Hancock Building and Marina City, part of a generation that has now, in its turn, also grown aged and vulnerable. “Nickel was no antimodernist,” says Cahan. “He was a huge fan of Mies van der Rohe. He was against great works being replaced by mediocre works. He could not understand that.”
