Chicago's Nelson Algren

They met in 1949 when Art was a reporter for Life. Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn t pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay s camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren s poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools.
Chicago s Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos many recently discovered and published here for the first time of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you ll see Shay s pictures; look at Shay s photos and you ll hear Nelson s words.