Smoking Man, diner at State and Ohio Streets, Chicago, 1971
Photograph and Text by Bruce Berman
This was the very beginning of my career, when I first realized what I wanted to be … a photographer. Not much has changed since then. This is exactly the kind of photograph I like to make, the kind of experience I like to have. Me on the prowl, encountering a person on the fringe, direct eye contact. The only thing I do now that I did not do then is to get more info about a person, really get to know them. At that time, and for many many years afterwards, I was just satisfied with getting the photograph. As time has gone on I now realize that that is incomplete. It’s the photograph and the text that matter, so that the person photographed is honored, not just used. Maybe that reflects aging, learning the world is not all about me but about me being in the world, about respect for others, maybe just about being a real documentary photographer.
So, here I am, 42 years later and I don’t know who he is, where he was from, what the name of the diner was, what he did for a living, exactly when the date was, etc., i.e., the 5Ws that any journalist knows are essential.
A detail I never noticed before, is his shoes. Believe it or not they are meaningful to me. In my old south side neighborhood, these are the kind of shoes we’d buy every few years. They were our main shoes (except for dress shoes). This man’s are the primos, the better ones, because they have finished leather. Ours were the exact same 10 lace model but a cheaper brand, and the leather on those was called “rough out.”
Why am I talking about shoes?
These were inexpensive boots. In the steel mill area shopping center at 91st and Commercial Blvd., these were “worker’s shoes.”
What kids at our grammar school derogatorily called them was Polish gym shoes. Indeed, because they had cork soles, we were allowed to wear them for our mandatory phys. ed. classes, thus the nickname. They didn’t mark up the gym’s maple floors.
These were fighting words if said by someone who was not from our group. Amongst us, that’s what we called them as well. Whoa be it to those who called them that weren’t from out group. Insult or noun, it depended where your family was coming from.The words, “Polish gym shoes,” implied your parents didn’t have enough money to buy a second pair of shoes, i.e., regular Converse type real gym shoes, and that your shoes were doing double duty. The majority of us were mostly from either Eastern Europe or Irish, many of the parents being first generation and working in the trades. The reason many of us wore Polish gym shoes, was that they were cheap. In that era, that Cold War era a lot of people in the neighborhood were refugees from Communism, mostly Eastern Europeans,; Poles, Estonians, Lithuanian, etc. They came with no English and with no money. Two pairs of shoes for two different purposes seemed like an extravagance, when one pair would do.
There were more than one, ah… scuffles … over those words, Polish gym shoes. A silly thing to fight over, I suppose, but at the time it was sort of a fight that seemed noble, honorable even
So, back to the photograph of this man, sitting in the diner, at the corner of State and Ohio Street on the near north side of Chicago, just north of the Loop, in the more, ah, urbane Chicago. There was a intuitive reason I chose this guy to photograph (and in those days, well, actually, still now) I found it very hard to approach people and ask to make a photo. If I had noticed this detail, this man, whose name I do not know, who helped me to begin my life as a photographer, I would have realized he was a “brother” of sorts. We both were wearers of Polish gym shoes.
Had I noticed this detail when I was shooting this it would have been a great opening gambit for me to lower that barrier that always exists between intruding photographer and wary subject. Maybe I would have asked his name, tried to know more about him, which I have come to know is the real reason and purpose I want to make photographs of people I don’t know and will probably never see again. I guess that would be called professionalism. That would come later.
The smoking man and I shared a common bond. We both knew–and wore–Polish gym shoes, and, I’m sure, we were both proud of it!