When a community newspaper dies, readers suffer and the truth goes dark. For decades in the Chicago area, the community newspaper has given birth to accomplished metropolitan editors, writers, and photographers. Too many to name here. My pathway included days and nights at the Aurora Beacon-News, Barrington Courier-Review, and the Suburban Sun-Times before landing at the Chicago Sun-Times.
The considerable legacy of Chicago photographer, Charles Cherney, is shaped by a similar story. He worked for Pioneer Press, the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, the Chicago Sun Times, and then the Chicago Tribune, where he spent 26 years.
Cherney touched all bases.
He was born on May 15, 1952 at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago. He lived in Chicago until the age of five when his family moved to Evanston. His father, Richard “Mickey” Cherney, was a salesman, his mother Isabelle “Red” Cherney, worked for a lighting manufacturer. Both were involved in community theater. In 1978, they relocated to Woodland Hills, CA, where aside from working in sales, Mickey also worked as an actor, landing roles in soap operas, an episode on “Fantasy Island”, and “Hill Street Blues”. His brother, Ed (1950-2019) became a Grammy and Emmy award winning recording engineer and producer, working with Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, the Rolling Stones and others. His sister, Leslie, was a floor director at WTTW in Chicago until she moved to CA in the early 1990’s. Meanwhile, Cherney stayed in Chicago.“
“I like L.A., but I didn’t like it”, he said with a laugh during a January 2025 interview in his studio at the Bridgeport Art Center on Chicago’s south side. “I loved the people in Chicago. I knew at age 14 I wanted to be a photographer. I was drawn to and amazed by the forceful images in the newspapers and Life magazine during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, as well as, of course, all sports pictures. I took my family’s Instamatic camera and with money I made with an after school job, bought a developing kit, an enlarger. I remember I went outside to the neighborhood park and took pictures of some guys shooting hoops. Went home, developed my first negatives and made my first prints. I couldn’t believe it!
Cherney started shooting high school basketball games. On a fast break out of Evanston Township High School, he began taking pictures for Pioneer Press, a suburban chain of newspapers. “They wanted me to shoot two or three games a night,” he continued. “New Trier, I’d go way west. I’d pull up the car with the blinkers on, shoot one or two rolls of film. You had to use (the film processing developer) Acufine for 20 minutes of whatever, depending on how dark the gym was. These were the film days.”
Cherney recalled that his first camera was a Mamiya/Sekor with a 50 mm lens. He next purchased a Nikon with an 85 mm lens and motor drive. “Back then all the great photographers usually started at a community newspaper, “ he said. “That’s how you got your chops. Shooting eight assignments a day, fast. Meeting colleagues face-to-face is one of the treasures of community journalism. Rich Frishman, who worked for Pioneer Press then went on to become an NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) photographer of the Year was the guy who taught me how to see. He shot everything with a 24-millimeter lens. I was a kid, trying to figure out how to make a good picture, how to create a “style.”
The close focusing and depth of field with the 24-millimeter wide-angle lens allow the photographer to make evocative portraits and street photography images. “Rich would shoot everything with a 24,” Cherney said. “He’s the first shooter I knew who went to Maxwell Street. One of his iconic pictures was ‘Remains of a Fighter’. He shot it with a 24 and all you saw was the face and his fist. So that’s what I did. I started photographing everything with a 24- millimeter lens. Frishman taught me how to frame,” he said. “How everything is important in that frame. I learned a lot. I was 19, 20 years old at the time. Kids today do it well right away. They watch YouTube videos to learn how to light, how to frame a picture. We didn’t have that.”
Cherney shot for Pioneer Press at night (when the games took place), and worked at Scott Foresman book publishing during the day. “They had a huge photo department. I’d shoot images that appeared in the the books as well as work in the lab. I developed film, making ten gallons at a time of D-76 (powered developer to process black and whites). We’d go through so much film.” My boss there, Jim Ballard, still keeps in touch with me and that means a lot.
Cherney graduated from ETHS in 1970. While his friends were going away to college, he stayed in Chicago. He took up the bass guitar and joined the Bitter Creek Newgrass Band, a rocked-up bluegrass outfit. ““We mostly played at the Clearwater Saloon on Lincoln Ave., and hung out at Orphan’s, Sterch’s, and Oxford Pub. We were having the best time.” Playing bass became a way for Cherney to downshift his energy.
One favorite phrase of legacy photographers is that are people who own cameras and there are photographers. There is a big difference. “I decided I wanted to move my career forward so I started working on my portfolio,” Cherney explained. “I spent my free time shooting images I thought would help. When you shoot Pioneer Press stuff you’re not building a good portfolio. “I went out looking for things.” He pulled up a black-and-white picture on his phone. It was a street shot of a lone figure standing on the sidewalk in the rain near the long-gone Sweet Lips Lounge on Lincoln Ave. Cherney
reminisced. “This is what Chicago looked like in 1976. When it rained, the streets and sidewalks flooded because they were in such bad shape. That’s the Paulina St. el stop in the background.” Another black-and-white image featured more than a dozen motorcycles from the Hell’s Henchmen gang parked in front of the Clearwater Saloon in 1977. Several of the riders are sitting on a stoop in front of the bar. “I asked if I could take the picture,” he said. “They were nice and said yes. I made them some prints.”
In July 1976, Cherney went to the Marquette Park riots that developed from protests demanding equal housing for Blacks. Activists were attacked and more than 30 people, including 16 Chicago cops, were injured. Cherney said, “A Black guy was walking through the Park. This white mob spotted him and just started violently pounding on him. Cops were trying to throw them off. It was powerful imagery. I can’t look at those pictures today. They’re not in my portfolio. I’m not proud of them, and not proud of what happened.”
“There are a lot of things I don’t show. My first week at the Tribune (January 1982), they had me go to Orleans Street, south of Division, to an area of rundown three flats. Something was going on. Get over there, get over there!” I was told. “I got out of the car with my camera, and I saw a fireman running with a little baby, holding him like a football. There was lots of fire and smoke. They’re handing kids over the fence to the cops. I saw things I can’t get rid of in my head to this day. Traumatic stuff.”
But Cherney’s deep empathy and ethic opened the doors at the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights. He was hired in 1978 and remained there for four years. “It’s where I started covering professional sports,” he said. “They went to seven days because they were trying to replace the Daily News. They went county wide, not just the Arlington Heights area.
Cherney won several photography contests during his tenure at the Daily Herald, and was noticed at the Sun-Times. The “Bright One” hired him in August 1982 and life moved in a flash. Four months later he was hired by the Tribune. Cherney landed in the sports beat with well-known photographers Bob Langer and Edward Wagner, Jr. He covered lots of Chicago sports throughout the 1980’s. “I was a young single guy,” he said. “Say, 1988. That was a great year. I shot Michael Jordan at the NBA All-Star Game (in Chicago). I got images of the slam dunk contest. I went to Calgary for the Winter Olympics. Came home, and went to the NCAA (basketball tournament) games wherever they were played, go and cover the Masters (in Georgia) for a day, then cover the Cubs opener in Atlanta. (The Cubs won 10-9, and later that summer, Wrigley Field made its debut under the lights. Then the Kentucky Derby. The summer Olympic trials used to be held in June and I’d cover that, and then the Bears season would start. I love sports. I love sportswriters.” Cherney also spent a couple of years shooting stills in the Tribune photo studio where he learned to be a disciplined shooter.
During his Tribune years, Cherney thought out the assignment before he shot the picture. “My process now is different,” he said. “Back then it was a lot of planning, as ‘how is the (natural) light going to be’?” Now I light almost everything I shoot, outdoors and indoors.
Cherney was part of a Tribune team that won a 2001 Pulitzer for “Gateway to Gridlock” - a series of articles that detailed how aviation works in America and how much traffic goes through O’Hare International Airport. For the 20th anniversary of the 1985 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears, Cherney traveled around the country taking portraits of 20 the now-retired players, in 4x5 format. He shot William “Refrigerator” Perry at his high school football field in Aiken, SC. He shot quarterback Jim McMahon relaxing in a hammock in the backyard of his north suburban home. Cherney positioned himself above McMahon for the best look. “I wanted to shoot 4x5 and use positive-negative film,” he said. “You can’t get that film anymore.”
One of Cherney’s most iconic photographs is of Chicago Cubs manager, Don Zimmer, and Tribune baseball columnist, Jerome Holtzman, sitting next to each other in a funky baseball dugout in Philadelphia. Zimmer is looking down and frowning. Holtzman isn’t smiling, either. He’s puffing away on a cigar. The beauty of these two grizzled men is they paid no attention to the camera. “It was a totally candid shot.” Cherney said. “The Cubs were in the pennant race (in 1989) and were supposed to clinch in New York. The game got rained out. I was with the writers and they said, ‘We’re going to take a train to Philadelphia in the morning’. We got to the park there’s Zim and Jerome sitting in the dugout before the game, and I shot the picture.” And, apparently, Jerome loved that picture because he asked Cherney for more prints whenever he would see him.
Cherney left the Tribune in April 2009 to embark on a lucrative freelance career that continues today. He has worked with Finkl Steel, the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, and Northwestern Hospital. He has done corporate portraits for Loyola Law School and various Chicago law firms. His biggest client is the Western Golf Association Evans Scholars Foundation in Glenview, happily combining his love of golf and photography.
I struggled for a couple of years until I got my business going,” he said. I took a few business courses when I got out (of print media). “Working for myself has given me a certain amount of freedom and free time. I’ve been lucky enough to pursue and achieve my dream, bringing moments that evoke emotion to paper for people to contemplate and to enjoy.”
Cherney lives in Morton Grove with his wife, Danita, a freelance photo stylist and Special Ed teaching assistant.
--Dave Hoekstra
