Lloyd DeGrane could not create the pictures he made without the empathy in his heart. DeGrane is best known for decades of contributions to the Chicago Reader along with the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. In 1991 he became the first and only journalist to photograph mass murderer Richard Speck. Speck agreed to be photographed while incarcerated at Stateville in Joliet. DeGrane’s continuing “Domestic Issues” series documented how working-class Chicagoans live ordinary lives.
But for the past eight years, DeGrane has been entrenched in Chicago’s large unhoused community, giving a face to people who endure the most inordinate conditions. He finds the same well of understanding that he did from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s when he was taking photographs at Stateville, Cook County Jail, and the Menard Correctional Center.
DeGrane studied behavioral studies at Governor’s State University in south suburban University Park, although he received his degree in communications in 1983. His background in psychology is what allows him to connect with his subjects. “I’ve always been interested in the way people move, the way people communicate, what they do,” DeGrane said in an extensive February 2024 interview. “I’m interested in documenting it and that’s important. It’s a sense of history. What we do now is not going to be done in the future. Off and on for many years I’ve been documenting matter of fact day to day activities; I photograph people vacuuming. Reading newspapers. Reading newspapers is going to be historically important. I don’t see print media lasting very much longer.”
DeGrane speaks in steady tones. He does not seem in a hurry to turn a page. His sentences are drawn out like one hand reaching out to another. His style reflects his humble roots.
Lloyd DeGrane was born on January 25 1948, around 92nd and Commercial in South Chicago. His mother Diana was a homemaker. His father Lloyd was a union pipe fitter who worked for the Chicago Housing Authority. Once in a while during the late 1950s and early 1960s DeGrane would tag along with his father on trips to the projects.
When DeGrane was four years old the family moved to the East Side, between South Chicago and Hegewisch. “Alphabet City,” he said in reference to the street names. “Nobody talks about that neighborhood. We were at 11153 Avenue G. Growing up we were surrounded by steel mills. Every summer when I was going to school, I worked in one of the steel mills. It was easy to get a job for a three-month summer vacation. I mostly did general labor.”
DeGrane went to Mendel High School and graduated early at the age of 17. He attended the University of Illinois but left in 1967 to see America. DeGrane and a friend bounced around on railways for eight months before landing in New Orleans. One night when DeGrane called home his mother told him a draft notice was waiting for him. His wanderlust had been derailed.
DeGrane was drafted in to the Army for a two-year stint as a radio teletype operator in Fort Huachuca AZ, Fort Gordon in Georgia, MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, FL. and in Turkey. After the service, DeGrane finished his studies at Governor’s State. He was not exploring photography on his American journey or his road trips with Uncle Sam. “I didn’t get into it until after the Army,” he explained. “At Governor’s State, I had a chance to make a presentation in a psychology class, one of three different ways. One way was putting a slide show together. I started taking pictures and the light bulb went off. I gravitated more to photo classes.” He found work as an assistant in the university photo laboratory.
DeGrane was a self-taught photographer. He took a couple of photo classes while studying psychology and a mentor in the lab. “I dove into it, a lot on my own,” he said. “I put in a lot of hours trying to learn the craft.” DeGrane’s first camera was a Pentax, followed by a Nikon and then some large format cameras.
DeGrane landed a part-time job as a general assignment photographer at the Star-Tribune in Chicago Heights. DeGrane spent three years at the Star-Tribune in the mid 1980’s.
“I tried to develop my own stories too,” he said. “I’d find people in suburbs like Ford Heights, one of the poorest towns in the state. I’ve always been interested in photographing people and what they do. I won a couple of awards with that newspaper.” He supplemented his income by working as a maintenance man at the Temple Anshe Sholom in Olympia Fields. “I hardly did anything except clean walls,” he said. “It was a Zen experience. I was able to think a lot. I got a little more into art photography at that time. So, I spanned both worlds, Art galleries and journalism.”
Like all of us growing up under the colorful spell of late ‘70s, early 1980s in Chicago journalism DeGrane paid attention to the daily newspapers. The Chicago Daily News published its last edition on March 4, 1978, it’s death had been preceded by the 1974 demise of Chicago Today. “Because I was doing fine art photography and photographing people over time, I was interested in the Reader more than anything,” he said. “Because that’s what they were doing.”
In 1987 he showed a portfolio to then Reader co-owner, art director Bob McCamant. “Remember those big satchels?,” DeGrane asked. “He liked my stuff. The Reader was very generous. You could make a living at the time working for the Reader. They paid well. They used a lot of pictures. And they paid you by the picture. It was very competitive. Not so much with the people that worked there, but just trying to get in the Reader. It was the coolest paper in the city. I actually used to get a bonus. I still contribute a couple of stories now and then. But I get paid now and, ‘is this enough to even pay for your gas on an assignment?’ It’s really not worth it.”
Much of DeGrane’s early work was in black-and-white. He believed the visual distractions of color are stripped away and the viewer is forced to focus on the content of the message. He explained, “If I could show someone a black-and-white image and not have to say a word about it and they understand what I’m trying to convey, then I’ve made a meaningful image. Now I’ve been shooting in color. I like to provide the nuances, the emotion and sometimes it all comes together, the stark reality that color renders. The message is in the details. Color is one more detail that helps explain things.”
At the same time DeGrane introduced himself to the Reader he was working on the book “Tuned In: Television in American Life” (University of Illinois Press, 1991). The book about home life and television viewing in the Midwest was featured on the front page of the now-defunct Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine.
McCamant quickly hired DeGrane. He did all kinds of things for the Reader, but only remembered one music assignment. He did not encroach on the turf of storied Reader music photographers Paul Natkin, Kirk West and the late D. Shigley. “I can’t remember the critic’s name, it was way back,” he said of Bill Wyman in 1993. “But he had just seen this woman at a coffee house and he liked what she was doing. He said to give her a call.” DeGrane met the singer-songwriter on a Sunday night. She was living in a “crummy apartment” in Wicker Park. “She was coming back from the laundromat with her wash,” he recalled. “I’m hauling lights up two flights of stairs in a big box. She hardly had any furniture. She was sexy. So she crawled up on a coffee table and I shot a couple pictures and it came out great. The story ran a couple weeks later and then everybody picked up on it. It was cool to break that story.”
The black-and-white image was of Liz Phair, leaning into the camera with a growling look. Around 1991 Phair was also a studio assistant for the late artist Ed Paschke in his studio. She helped him organize his archives and clean his brushes.
In 2015 and 2016 DeGrane received Medill School of Journalism fellowships to chronicle the unhoused and study housing issues in Chicago. The experience led DeGrane to pursue his own thoughts on housing. “I was living in Bridgeport at the time,” he said. “Just north of Chinatown in that parcel that the White Sox want to convert to a stadium. (Now called 78, denoting the city’s 78th neighborhood.) I’d see people live there. I started walking from Bridgeport into those fields.”
DeGrane met an unhoused Chinese gentleman. He created the first pathway for DeGrane to meet other unhoused people. “It was odd to see a Chinese person homeless but he had been there a few years,” DeGrane recalled. “I started documenting him for a couple of weeks and moved north towards downtown. There was a writer, Kari (Lydersen). She worked for the Washington Post. She spoke Spanish. I speak a little Spanish. The Chinese guy speaks a little English but mostly Chinese. It was tough communicating. He told me about these people he met called ‘The Spanish.’ They were living under a viaduct there. He’d shake somebody’s tent but he didn’t know them. And I had to explain what I was doing.”
Lydersen is now an assistant professor at Medill. She was able to talk to the unhoused population in Spanish. “What was going on was these two Chinese companies hired almost all day laborers,” DeGrane said .“They’d pick up these guys and send them to different cities like Indianapolis. They would wash dishes in restaurants for 10 to 12 hours a day for a couple of weeks. They’d come back to Chicago with $100 or $200 after working all these hours for a couple of weeks. So they were getting exploited by these companies. We did a story and it ran in the Guardian in April 2016.”
DeGrane documented the 78 section for two years until it was fenced off in 2019 and the unhoused were forced out. Some people ended up downtown. “That’s when I started picking up on the hard drugs and heroin and the people who were addicted,” DeGrane said. “Downtown you had to make enough money to buy heroin. That took a while to get into that world. I stopped counting the dead people I knew at 23. Some people did manage to get housing. But many of the people I knew when I started this are dead. Long term addiction. Overdoses. Severe health problems. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) says a little over half a million people have died of opioid-related deaths in the United States.”
DeGrane learned to bring cigarettes and Hersey’s Kisses as trust building tokens. “Part of that fellowship was that I had to take graduate students,” he said. “They’d ask what to do. I’d say buy a bag of Hershey Kisses. Every opioid addict loves sweets. They also love cigarettes.”
DeGrane sometimes bends traditional journalistic barriers when he is working with the unhoused. He volunteers for the Night Ministry, the Chicago-based group that provides housing support and health care to the unhoused and poverty stricken. “I consider myself to be more of a documentarian,” he said. “And an advocate.”
DeGrane is married to Laurel Berman, an environmental health scientist at CDC. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences from the University of Illinois. DeGrane has a son Sam DeGrane 35, who is a police officer in the Austin 15th District.
Standing 6’3” tall, Lloyd DeGrane’s trust has never been challenged. “If somebody has a knife it doesn’t matter,” he said. “After a while I got to know the lay of the land and the people. I know when to go. You feel a vibe. I’ve been doing this for years. There’s no rush. If you miss one week you go back a week later.” He does not carry a tripod, that’s like advertising you’re carrying an expensive camera. He only brings a Nikon camera, notebook, cigarettes and voice recorder, all stored in his backpack. In many places Lower Wacker still has sodium vapor lights that create an amber glow. “It makes things kind of mysterious,” he said. “You’re shooting and in your camera screen, everything is yellow. There’s no natural light at all. The people down there live in darkness.”
DeGrane estimated he has made nearly 3,000 images of the Chicago unhoused over the years. He explained, “You have to shoot pictures to study things. Then you get deeper into it. Because I go back and talk to people I can look at some pictures and say, ‘Maybe this would be more meaningful. That is if the people are still around, some just disappear.
The end game, he said, might be a book. He also lectures on housing issues and addiction by showing his photography on Power Point. “I feel it is starting to wind down a bit,” he said. “Maybe it is time to gather up all the stuff. I don’t go as much as I used to but that’s because a lot of people I knew are dead. I used to go downtown two or three times a week whatever I could fit into my schedule. Now I go maybe once or twice a week. I walk maybe four to eight miles a day when I’m documenting things downtown. Walking is the only way to find those people. They always tell me, ‘This isn’t my home. This is where I stay.’ And that can be very transitory. I learned to never make an appointment with a homeless person for more than a couple of hours into the future. If you say, ‘I’ll be here tomorrow at 9 o’clock, they’re probably not going to be there. Because their world can change in a matter of hours. They get arrested, they get beat up. They end up in a hospital or in jail. Anything can happen.”
DeGrane’s archives are in good shape. His images can be seen at lloyddegrane.com. Photography of his prison work can be seen at the Chicago History Museum. He has done commercial work for the University of Chicago and they have archived those images. “Obama, all the Supreme Court justices that visit the University of Chicago,” he said. “I’ve photographed them through the years. I also work for the Alliance of the Great Lakes. It’s almost a cathartic exercise, wash away the black hole of homelessness and addiction.”
Another book in waiting would be his “Domestic Issues,” the ongoing project that goes back to 1987. The series started in homes of the southern suburbs and moved into different parts of the city. It illustrates how working-class people get by on a daily basis. “In the domestic issues series, I try to capture the ordinary, the epitome of people vacuuming their rugs,” he explained. “It’s similar to homeless-addicted people doing the same thing every day to get their sick off. Doing the same thing over and over every day and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity. Some people have interpreted my work to be more like cultural anthropology. But it is unusual how I switched from people in their homes to the homeless.”
--Dave Hoekstra
