Michael Bracey has made pictures all over the world. He has traveled to Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru, Portugal, and other ports of life. But his style is shaped by his Chicago home. Bracey is a photographer of depth and conviction. He is not in your face. He is empowered by his humanitarian vision.
That’s the Chicago way of photography.
In the early 2000s, Bracey was president of The Chicago Alliance of African-American Photographers (CAAAP.) In 2006 Roosevelt University published “The Journey: The Next 100 Years,” a collection of the work of CAAP photographers chronicling the Chicago Black community. It is an all-star gathering of the city’s most remarkable picture-takers: Pulitzer Prize winners John H. White and Ovie Carter are included as well as iconic photographers Bob Black, Milbert O. Brown, Jr., Bobby Sengstacke (his great-uncle founded the Chicago Defender for which Sengstacke worked) and more. And yes, Bracey’s work is represented, such as a poignant moment of his Great Aunt Peggy with her head bowed in her nursing home room after she was told about the death of a dear friend.
His most recent book, “Beautiful Faces of Colombia” is a collaboration with Chicago writer and illustrator Ruth Goring that explores the Afro-Colombian communities across the country of 51 million people. “Beautiful Faces of Colombia (“Caras Lindas de Colombia”) won the first prize art book in the North Street Book Prize 2023, a U.S.-based competition for self-published or hybrid-published books.
Bracey is a self-made man. His parents George and Letha were part of the second wave of the Great Migration. In 1946 they arrived in Chicago from Jackson, MS where George found work in the steel mills. Bracey’s two older siblings were born in Chicago and overall he is the youngest of eight children. “As my mother would say, ‘I’m the last button on the coat’,” Bracey said in an early August 2024 interview in his home in suburban Maywood.
Bracey was born on July 10, 1958, in Key West, FL.
George rejoined the U.S. Navy between 1950 and 1955 and was stationed in Key West in 1958. When Michael was 13 months old, the family moved to Charleston, S.C. working their way north. On April 10, 1963, the family was living in Groton, CT when his father was assigned as a third-class steward on the USS Thresher. The nuclear-powered submarine sank during deep-diving tests in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass. “There were 129 men aboard the ship,” Bracey said. “He was the oldest at age 43. The youngest was straight out of high school. The Naval Base was in Portsmouth New Hampshire.”
As a single mother, Letha did not want to return to Jim Crow Mississippi and she hesitated on returning to the urban environments of Chicago. “She chose somewhere in-between,” Bracey said. “And that was a naval air station base in Hutchinson, Kansas of all places. They had been stationed there on their way to Florida. They liked the community. It was a small community, a church community. My second oldest sister met a guy and got married so they were stable there. My mother wanted stability.”
Michael spent 15 years in Hutchinson, a town of 40,000 along the Arkansas River. Hutchinson is the hometown of Murry Wilson, father of the Beach Boys’ Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson as well as poet William Edgar Stafford, whose 1963 collection “Traveling Through the Dark” won the 1963 National Book Award for Poetry.
“I learned a lot in Hutchinson,” Bracey said. “There was a small African-American community. We had books in our house. Some of the things I was learning in history class did not gel with what I was learning at home. I knew African-American people had done more than be slaves. All of the teachers were white, except one. One of my parent’s friends was a photographer. He was the Black community photographer. If there was a birthday party or a church event, he was there to photograph.”
The Black photographer was the late Joe Sprouse. He freelanced around town and did not work for the community’s Hutchinson News newspaper. In the early 1980s future Chicago Tribune-White House photographer for President Obama photographer Pete Souza cut his teeth at the Hutchinson News. A copy of Souza’s 2017 “Obama: An Intimate Portrait” photo book was on his living room bookshelf a couple of rows down from Kamala Harris’ “The Truths We Hold.”
“I was playing around with photography,” Bracey recalled. “I wanted to join a photography class at the (Hutchinson) high school but they said it was full. That didn’t go well with my 16-year-old mind. Mr. Sprouse said, ‘I want you to come with me to this lecture.’ So I went. I had no idea who I was going to see.”
The guest lecturer was Gordon Parks (1912-2006), the photographer, film director, writer and composer, who also grew up Black in a segregated Kansas. Sprouse’s wife was raised with Parks in Fort Scott KS. “What he had gone through struck a chord in me because of what I was going through as a 16-year old Black boy in this small white town in Kansas,” Bracey recalled. “One thing he said that hit me was when he learned photography he chose to use his camera as a weapon to expose what was going on not only in my (Kansas) world, but in Brazil and other places. I didn’t know who he was but it stayed with me as I grew up.”
Bracey’s first camera was an affordable Nikon Nikkormat but even as a teenager he was thinking outside the box. “The camera is just an inanimate object,” he said. And then he pointed to his head. “It’s this,” he said. “Only when you pick it up it comes alive. The equipment is not that important.”
Parks was the first Black staff photographer and writer for Life magazine. He directed the 1971 hit movie “Shaft.” He wrote three books and his 1966 autobiography “A Choice of Weapons” was turned into the 2021 HBO documentary “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by
Gordon Parks.”
Bracey said, “And we were being weaponized. So throw it back at them. But my voice began to develop when I moved to Chicago in 1984.”
In 1981 Bracey graduated with a BA in media from Webster University in St. Louis. In 1983 he joined the Navy and in 1984 and landed in the Navy Reserves in suburban Forest Park. He spent weekends in Chicago. “The Black community walked with their heads up because of Harold Washington,” he said. “This was the place to be.”
Also, in the early 1980s Bracey was on vacation in the Caribbean. He recalled, “I took pictures--I didn’t make photographs. I took pictures of people who looked like me. They had similar histories.”
Bracey shared his nascent photographs with friends like freelance photographer Bill Scott. “They saw a pattern in my work before I did,” he said. “I met Bill a month after I moved to Chicago. In 1997 Bill and I sold our work at an art fair by Taste of Chicago. This guy with a woman and a baby in a carriage came by. He liked one of my pictures but said he forgot his wallet. I didn’t know about that. But Bill said, ‘Oh, that’s (Sun-Times photographer) Bob Black, he will send you the money. I didn’t know who he was. I gave him the picture and a week after that I got the check.” The photograph was of Bracey’s teenage niece wearing a hat and holding a basket of flowers while facing a window. Years later Bracey saw his softly lit picture in Black’s Humboldt Park home.
“Honestly, I was more of an artist than commercial,” he continued. “I made money but I didn’t strive to do that. The pieces of the puzzle started coming together when I started thinking about how I grew up and how important books were to me. My mother would say, ‘The man can take your house, he can take your hat, your car, but he can’t take what you have between your ears.”
Two of the most important books Bracey read in his formative years was “The Measure of a Man” by actor Sidney Poitier and Parks’ “A Choice of Weapons.” Bracey said, “Parks chose to use his camera to expose the ‘isms’ in America.”
Parks continues as one of the cornerstones of Bracey’s career. “He documented what was going on socially,” Bracey said. “The work of Henri Cartier-Bresson had a lot of psychology in it. I learned to incorporate that in my work. And then the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado. I got the opportunity to meet him. His work is also very social and political. From Cartier-Bresson I include geometrics. But with Bob Black I learned to include emotion in my work.”
Bracey moved forward in the fertile Chicago photography community. He obtained an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College in 1997 and then became the second president of CAAAP. Bracey was the recipient of CAAAP’s John H. White Award for Portfolio of the Year 2000. White received a Pulitzer Prize for his work in the Chicago Sun-Times.
The group was inspired by Chicago Tribune photographer Milbert O. Brown, Jr. “In 1999 Milbert came up with the idea, thinking ahead, to document the African-American community in the Chicago area Chicago as we entered the new millennium, ” Bracey said. “Milbert was the president, Bob (Black) was the vice-president and I was vice-president. Milbert and I lived around the corner from each other in Austin. The purpose was to document the African-American community throughout 2000. I grew up with books and I thought the work we had done I threw the book idea out there.”
Black photographers from the Chicago assembled in a parallel effort to the Chicago in the Year 2000 (City 2000) project that was funded by the Comer Family Foundation. In City 2000, more than 200 photographers documented everyday life in Chicago for a year. Lots of people heard about City 2000 Not as many heard about the CAAAP effort even though it produced the fine 160-page book “The Journey: The Next 100 years.” By the end of 2000, CAAAP photographers produced more than 30,000 images.
Bracey obtained a Chicago Arts Assistance Council grant and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for his book “Africans Within the Americas” and couldn’t continue with the CAAAP book project. CAAAP Vice-President Jim Morris took over and got the book published.
“City 2000 had money,” Bracey said. “Land’s End (Comer Family Foundation) funded them. We didn’t have money. I did shooting for Land’s End, too. Theirs was all of Chicago and ours was basically the Black community. This was back during the film days and we got film from Kodak.” Kodak donated 1,2000 rolls of film as well as developing supplies.
“We got some funding from the Tribune (The Chicago Tribune Foundation) and Milbert’s fraternity,” Bracey said. “We did what we could to get it out there.” Pictures from the project are part of the Chicago Historical Society collection.
In the foreword to “The Journey,” Brown wrote in part that the photo project was fueled by the media’s “consistently negative portrayal” of the Black community and that positive aspects “remained invisible.”
Bracey explained, “We wanted to show our lives through our eyes. This is our life. Like everything, there is good and there is bad. Humans are always drawn to drama and negativity. I don’t know why. But there is more good than bad. I do my diaspora work because we look at television and see poverty on the continent of Africa and naked people running around. It’s not like that. I tell people, ‘When you travel, get out of your American head.’ Because you’re going to compare your living room with somebody else’s living room. We have to be open-minded.”
“The Journey” exhibited at the South Side Community Arts Center, where CAAP held its monthly meetings. The show also traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Beverly Arts Center and Northwestern University.
CAAAP still exists.
“I wouldn’t call it an organization, I’d call it a club,” Bracey said. “At its peak we had around 80 members. In its way it was competitive. We met once a month. The month before we would hand in our film and Milbert and Bob would develop it. They would create slides. They would show us the slides the next month and we’d all look at them.”
The Chicago Alliance of African-American Photographers gave Bracey the confidence to pursue his book career that continues today. He had been working in the Teacher’s Retirement System For The State of Illinois when he received his fellowship and grant. He took a leave from that gig, which resulted in the 2007 photo book “Africans Within the Americas” with a foreword by Dr. Margaret Burroughs, co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African-American History in Chicago. Burroughs encouraged Bracey to self-publish the book after a previous deal fell through. The ongoing project has taken Bracey to 14 countries. He hears the spirit of many languages.
The seeds for “Africans Within the Americas” were planted as early as 1998 when Bracey spent a week in Jamaica with his then-wife. On a parasailing adventure, he heard a deckhand with flowing dreadlocks singing a song with a floating tempo. He could not get the song out of his mind. When Bracey returned home he visited a record store on 53rd Street in Hyde Park and hummed the tune. The tune struck a chord with the store clerk. “He said, ‘That’s a (1977) song by Peter Tosh called ‘African’,” Bracey recalled. “With the lyrics Tosh says, ‘No matter where you come from, as long as you’re a Black man, you’re an African!’ So getting feedback on my photos and remembering what I didn’t learn in history class, the pieces of the project started coming together.”
That was followed by 2010’s “Urban Waters” edited by Bob Black and former Chicago Tribune photographer David Trotman-Wilkins. Bracey celebrated the decisive moment with black and white photos of children from Austin to Englewood playing in live fire hydrants. He also included a mystical 2001 kids-in-hydrant picture from Fairgrounds Park in Hutchinson. The words of “Urban Waters” were provided by Bracey’s fellow Hutchinson High School graduate Marilee Southworth, a New Orleans-based songwriter-poet-and piano player who had opened for acts like Cyndi Lauper and Warren Zevon. “Our mothers worked
together at the community college,” he said. “She was second runner-up to Miss Kansas. She’s since passed away (in 2012 from brain cancer at age 53). I sent her pictures and she wrote poetry for them.”
Here is her poem “Hope” that accompanied Bracey’s black and white image of two young boys in large hydrant puddle in the Austin neighborhood, circa 2001:
“From heaven to earth
There will always be thirst
From Mama we learned
There will always be thirst
But look up, there’s hope
Please fill up my cup
There’s rainbows in the park
If you only look up.”
“Beautiful Faces of Colombia” was released in 2018 and is considered the second in the series of the “Africans Within the Americas” books. Bracey collaborated with Goring, who was born in Kansas and spent eight years in Colombia from age six as part of a large missionary family. “A lot of people don’t know about Black people in Colombia,” Bracey said. “My wife Maria and I went to Colombia with Ruth in 2014 just to travel. I didn’t think we were going to do a book but when we came back and started looking at the work it was ‘Okay, we’re going to put this between two covers.’ The book covers travels to Cartagena, the island of Boca Chica, Palenque de San Basilio (a UNESCO cultural heritage site founded by escaped slaves in the 17th Century) and more. “My wife is Latina,” he said. “She’s my translator.”
Bracey sells his books at exhibitions and through his website; michaelbracey.photography. “My wife and I aren’t rich, but if we want to do something we ask the universe and get blessed that way,” said Bracey, a member of the non-denominational Soul City Church in Chicago. “Thoughts are very powerful and form outcomes.” Bracey lives with his wife Maria Vazquez in an 1883 house in Maywood, accented by beautiful blue siding. Their living room is filled with artwork from his travels and framed 1968 Life magazine covers of Dr. Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and a 1970 Life magazine cover of American activist Angela Davis.
Like many other artists in this project, he is unclear about the status of his archives. Bracey has two children, son Julian, 37, from a previous marriage and stepdaughter Shavonne, also 37. “I have negatives upstairs and they’re not organized,” he said. “My archives have been on my mind. Verbally people know about my archives.”
Meanwhile, he continues with new ideas. In the summer of 2024 Bracey had a bound prototype for an 80-page book titled “Village That Raised Me (A Narrative of the African-American Family Base).” He looked at the mock-up on a dining room table and said, “It’s the importance of families being together. People these days don’t understand the importance of community. The village helps make you who you become. Everybody can be a learning factor. Another project is documenting families that have dinner together. It’s called ‘Dinner Served’ with people in Cambodia, Colombia and other places having dinner together.”
One of Bracey’s gifts is to give his photographs a unifying character. “Photography is art,” he said. “And then there’s the art of photography. The public only sees the results. They don’t see what goes into making a photo. And everybody thinks they’re a ‘photographer.’ They don’t even know what it is. It’s a Greek word that means to draw with light. And you have to choose the right moment to press that shutter. In the film days we only had 24, 36 shots. With digital, it is endless. There’s a big difference between taking pictures and making a photograph. It is work. It involves composition. It involves being able to read light and understand light.”
And Michael Bracey has made it his mission to share life’s bright promise across the world. He knows it is there for everyone to see
.--Dave Hoekstra
