Not many people have had a 40-year career with the Chicago Cubs, but photographer Stephen Green accomplished that feat in a heartfelt and inconspicuous nature. Green was the Cubs team photographer from 1982 until 2022. His tenure pretty much matched my years as a Cubs season ticket holder. From my perch in the far right field terrace reserve seats, I have hundreds of images in my mind of Green darting around the field for pre-game photos or shooting a summer sunset through the twinkle of the left field grandstands.
There he was. And then he was gone.
The endearing fortitude of Wrigley Field initially intrigued Green about documenting the ballpark. He received a grant from the Illinois Arts Council in 1982 to capture Wrigley as the last daylight family-owned ballpark in America. “I grew up there and I loved it for that,” Green said over a February 2024 lunch at an Oak Park deli. “And they never won when I was a kid in the ‘60s. I wanted to document something but I also loved blues and jazz. When I approached the Wrigleys in 1981, I asked if I could have access. It was about the stadium. And the place. Not about the game.”
In 1981 it was easy for a young unknown media type to contact the family that owned the Cubs. Green connected with the Wrigley family, who passed his request on to the late Cubs PR director Buck Peden. Peden asked Green if the Cubs could use some of his pictures for promotional purposes. He eagerly agreed. Green had the green light to explore the friendly confines starting with the 1982 season.
Green’s association with the Cubs opened up a world of doors. He was able to connect with outlets like Sports Illustrated and ESPN. He produced coffee table books such as “Fly the W” about the Cubs 2016 championship season and 2008’s “Cubs Forever: Memories from the Men Who Lived Them” with WGN-TV’s Bob Vorwald. He’s also released music books such as 1991’s “Going to Chicago: A Year on the Chicago Blues Scene” and 1996’s “Really the Blues” with interviews by Mindy Giles. He was a staff photographer for the Oprah Winfrey Show and has captured many corporate events.
Stephen Green was born on March 10, 1952 in Evanston. He grew up in Evanston and Wilmette and attended New Trier East High School. His parents attended Northwestern University. Green’s mother Irene Monahan Green was a Chicago Public School teacher who raised five kids. His father James W. Green, Sr. was a Chicago Sun-Times feature writer who went on to produce the Mr. Wizard science television show for WNBQ-TV (now WMAQ-TV) before it left Chicago for New York in 1955. Green, Sr. then pursued a career in advertising, specializing in public service announcements for the rights of the disabled. “He was able to get a Nikon that I borrowed when I was in high school,” Green said. “That opened up my mind. Nikon was a special camera back then. Having the right lenses and the right equipment made a difference.”
Of course, if your father has produced “Mr. Wizard” you are bound to have a curious mind. When Green wasn’t going to Cubs games he was spending afternoons looking at the street photography made by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lee Friedlander at the Art Institute. After high school Green received a scholarship to the University of Kansas. He lasted for two months. He didn’t like it. “1970, the world erupted, riots, stuff going around at KU,” he said. “So I hitchhiked around the United States for a while.” Green landed at the experimental Evergreen State College in Olympia, WS. where he earned a degree in art history and learned photography on the side. “They had a darkroom,” he said. “It was a new school so they had state-of--the art stuff.” Green did freelance photography in Portland, OR. and also worked at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland where he became more intrigued with street photography. “That resonated with me so I did that for a while,” he said. “I got to a point where I was broke. Doing street photography and art. I thought I’d get a graduate degree that might lead somewhere. Fortunately, I picked Wrigley Field.”
Green first pursued an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) at the Art Institute of Chicago, but the school didn’t offer a scholarship and he couldn’t afford tuition. Green was still broke when he returned from Oregon in 1981 so his parents allowed him to sleep on the couch of their Evanston condo. He worked nights as a waiter at the San Marco restaurant at Plaza del Lago in Wilmette. He got hired by Northwestern University to run their darkroom and teach students how to print. As part of his grant, he operated the darkroom at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston. “I worked the darkroom, waited tables and did the Cubs thing,” he said. Green documented Wrigley Field during the day. The 1982 Cubs? They finished with a dark 73-89 record under manager Lee Elia.
“I wasn’t an active photographer at all,” he explained. “I was a documentary-art photographer. Barney Sterling was their team photographer and George Brace (whose baseball photo career went back to 1929) provided all the photos. Barney did the film and the PR (Public Relations). At first Barney was reluctant. He thought I was trying to take his work. It turned out that he was getting tired so I offered to do PR and stuff he didn’t want to do. I got to know people in the front office. There were only 60 people at that point. It was daytime ball. I could take the El there. They let me come for a year. I didn’t know anything about major league baseball or pro sports. It was a much looser time.
“I kept asking people like (the Chicago Tribune’s) Bob Langer ‘How do you do this?, How do you shoot?’ and they gave me tips. One, get the right equipment. Get your timing down. Look for things you can do that nobody else can do. And because of the access the Cubs gave me
there was no reason to sit next to those guys in the photo well. I could shoot anywhere. So I got a different angle on the game. I was never a journalist. I came from a documentary background. Those guys had to tell stories behind pictures, go out and get it done. I was there to tell stories about the place, the game and the organization. Eventually (other photographers) would call and say, ‘There’s a freelance assignment here, there’s this and that.’ At the end of the season Barney retired. They asked me if I wanted to come on, do their PR and all that.”
Yes please.
Green actually worked from a darkroom at Wrigley Field. The Wrigleys sold to the Tribune Company in 1981 and built Green a black and white darkroom in the basement of the caretaker’s house in the northwest corner of the ballpark. It contained a huge sink, running water, a Bessler enlarger that could print 35 mm and medium format films and make proofs of historical images. Green also installed his own sound system with a cassette player and radio. The darkroom remained until 1988 when lights were installed. “I had keys to get in and work whenever I wanted to which was a blessing and a privilege,” he said. “Day or night, game day and non-game day, in season and off-season. It was awesome to have that access and trust.”
The Cubs also allowed Green to pursue freelance assignments in the off-season. With the new gig and benefits, he finally got his apartment. He networked with Calumet Photographic in Chicago who helped increase Green’s exposure by giving talks and introducing him to other people in the photography world. Canon photography sponsored Green and helped him move from film to digital. “Technical stuff, I’m kind of lost,” Green said. “I got hooked up with Fuji and Kodak and started realizing the whole sponsorship thing that came along with being associated with the Cubs. And then major league baseball started taking off and becoming more popular. The Cubs were hugely popular because of WGN and cable. The Tribune Company decided they were going to promote this team. They understood what they had in the fan base and the news between WGN-TV and WGN radio and marketing. They started selling and they wanted images to back that up. And for me it was more the place than the game and the players. And they were not a winning team.
“And then they started to win.”
In 1981 the Tribune Company hired Dallas Green away from the Philadelphia Phillies. As the Cubs executive vice-president and general manager the former Phillies manager changed the culture of the organization. One of his first moves was to acquire future Hall-of-Famer Ryne Sandberg from the Phillies. “And out of nowhere came 1984,” Stephen Green said of the first Cubs post-season appearance since 1945. “And that’s when I started getting involved with Sports Illustrated, Sport magazine and all of that. Because they wanted imagery. And I was staff photographer.
“I got mentored by guys who were so much better than me, the icons of the (photography) game. All you had to do was not be a jerk. In this business there’s a lot of jerks. If you’re humble enough and say, ‘I appreciate what you do and I’m not trying to take your work,’ they are happy to help you. And they (the Cubs) wanted me not to screw up the business model. The Cubs got that it was to their benefit to get images to Sport magazine, Topps (baseball cards), a poster. The wire services and newspapers didn’t want to take images from the team because they wanted to keep journalistic independence. The ownership of the Tribune separated the newspaper and the team. I did not realize the scope of that (Cubs) name. The doors would open for you. And the encouragement to use that name but not to compromise that. That balance of trust was important and it’s become more of an issue today with trademarks, infringements, and what you can do with pictures.”
Much of the game has changed since Green entered the world of sports photography. “The biggest changes for me were digital and the expectations of immediacy,” he said. “And the devaluation of the skills it takes to make a picture. Teams and the media have gone from friendly and partners to antipathy.”
Early in the Dallas Green tenure, Stephen was sometimes confused with his feisty boss. “When Dallas came on they wanted me to start covering the team on the road,” Green said. “The first two road trips I did my rooms were really good. They thought I was related to him somehow until they saw us together. Because I’m 5’6” and he was 6’5”. He was aggressive, in your face. There was no room for compromise. I didn’t know what I was doing. At the end of the season I got a call to his office, he wanted to see a slideshow of my work. I thought, ‘Did I do something?’ So I did the slideshow and he said nothing, no oohs-ahs or ‘great picture.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ Then he finally said, ‘Well, you covered it all. I had no idea what you were doing but you did it well.’ He was very demanding of everybody. But then it was do what you do and go where you want to go.”
Stephen Green was around for more than 3,000 games at Wrigley over his career. He also shot every major Wrigley concert since Jimmy Buffett played the first-ever ballpark show in September 2005. Green couldn’t land on a favorite image. “There’s a bunch of them, I kept wanting there to be more,” he said. “I hope I haven’t taken my best image yet. I was in love with the scoreboard and the atmosphere. The lake effect at the ballpark. The fog. You can show up at a game and it will be 90 degrees. It could be 72 and foggy by the end of the game, or vice-versa. Rain and all that. But at the beginning, it was all daylight. I was captivated. I loved the light, the shadowing, and the colors. The changing (color) of the ivy. It was all a metaphor for me all the time.”
Green became a master of light and space as he documented the ballpark that was built in 1914. His black and white portrait of five rows of snow-covered empty seats (with one seat up) shot from the upper deck established a chorus of springtime anticipation. His access to the inside of the center field scoreboard counterpointed the manual scoreboard worker against a distant skyline. And Green never ignored the game day hustle and vibe on the sidewalks outside of Wrigley. He just didn’t document Wrigley. He became part of Wrigley’s ecosystem.
Green also started shooting Chicago blues artists such as Koko Taylor, Junior Wells, and Willie Dixon around 1985. Alligator Records founder Bruce Iglauer became his pathway into the blues scene. “I wasn’t asking for anything,” he said. “I didn’t need money. I was just asking for introductions. And he provided them for me along the way.”
With the Cubs, Green had success with coffee table picture books produced by Woodford Publishing in San Francisco. The imprint was created by Laurence Hyman, whose mother was the acclaimed mystery writer Shirley Jackson. Woodford published Green’s “Going to Chicago” and “Really the Blues.”
In 1989 photographer Paul Natkin went on the road with the Rolling Stones. He called on Green to fill in for his gig as photographer for “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in Chicago. After the Stones tour, Natkin elected not to return to Oprah and Green kept the job through 1996. “Paul and I had a similar feeling towards humility,” Green said. “It’s about what you’re shooting, it’s not about me. There was a trust built in that I wasn’t going to take his work, that I was going to behave correctly, show up on time, be prepared. As well as making pictures. Making pictures was kind of the easiest part of that. Dealing with clients is the hard part. Some have big egos. You talk to people, you’re not an idiot, you respect what they do and you don’t want to compromise your work. It’s not my style to get in someone’s face.”
There was a point in the early 1990s when Green was shooting Oprah, Wrigley Field, and Michael Jordan for Time magazine. “I’d do all three in a day,” he said. “Oprah was nine in the morning, we’d be on set ready to go at 8:30. It was over at ten. It was live TV. It was over. I’d get to Wrigley by 11 for batting practice. And then the Bulls. There are only 40 home games for the Bulls. I was only there in case something happened to Michael. Time paid me less but I owned my images. I covered his whole career.
“What was different about Oprah is that it wasn’t a photo shoot. You’re shooting around a TV set. The lighting is not for you. The moment is not for you. You have to stay out of the way, be quiet, and recognize the moment. You hope they let you know what is coming. She had scripted segments yet she created segments where things could happen. You knew if they were going to bring out a hundred balloons or a clown.” Natkin added, “I shot her first weight loss show where she pulled a little red wagon with 54 pounds of animal fat on the stage. They told me that was going to happen.”
Yet, it was an element of surprise that became a cornerstone of Green’s life.
He met his wife Lisa at Wrigley Field. Her background was in dance and theater. The Oak Park native was not a sports fan, but her grandmother Bea was a die-hard Cubs fan. In 1994 Chicago producer Michael Cullen was opening the Mercury Theater, a few blocks west of Wrigley Field, and Bea was interested in becoming an investor. “He asked me if I could somehow get her on the field and take a picture of her,” Green recalled. He cleared the photo shoot with the Cubs PR department and recruited announcer Harry Caray for the photo. “She was a charming lady and Harry was great to me,” Green said. “He understood who I was in the organization and how I had his best interest at heart. I wouldn’t take pictures of things I shouldn’t be taking of. That’s the trust you build. So we did all that, the game started and there was a rain delay. I went back to meet Michael and the family. And that’s where I met my wife.”
Green has now been married for almost 30 years. He and Lisa have two children; son Aidan Green is a theater tech who was traveling with the 2024 tour of “Mean Girls.” In 2023 daughter Shaelyn is an event planner who is married to the popular Oak Park barber Mecca Highsmith.
Green decided to retire from the Cubs because he felt he had nothing else to add. “I was done,” he said. “My wife was like, ‘We can do this.’ Our kids are grown. It was one of those jobs that I respect so much that if I wasn’t able to bring something to it I shouldn’t be doing it. I was done.”
But he is not done making pictures.
He now shoots for himself, focusing on the promising trails of the United States. “I’m working on the backroads of America,” he said. “And up and down the Mississippi River. I’m working with the University of Mississippi on that. When I was in Arizona (for Spring Training), I’d take three or four days off to wander around Arizona. Or if I was on a road trip I’d take an extra day to shoot street scenes in L.A. or San Francisco.” Stephen Green’s photography career has been defined by the extra mile.
Time is in good hands.
Dave Hoekstra
