They met in 1949 when Art Shay was a reporter for "Life. "Shay followed Nelson 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 Algren's words.After flying twenty-nine combat missions in World War II, Art Shay joined "Life "magazine as a staff reporter, before leaving to become one of America's leading photojournalists. His pictures regularly appeared in "TIME, Fortune, "the "The Saturday Evening Post, Forbes, Business Week, PARADE, The New York Times Magazine, "and more than three hundred books.
