The renowned photographer and darkroom magician Ron Gordon grew up on the Southeast Side of Chicago. The Southeast Side has always been a sailor’s tattoo on the muscular arms of the city. Many of Gordon’s peers found work in the neighboring steel mills, joined the military, or did the third shift in a South Side factory.
Gordon saw a different light.
He attended the University of Illinois for two years at its Navy Pier campus before sailing away to Champaign-Urbana where in 1965 he obtained a BA in French and English. He received a scholarship to teach English in 1965-66 in France. Gordon returned to Chicago and by 1968 he had a Master’s Degree in Language and Literature from the University of Illinois. Ron’s first professional studio was in Pilsen in 1973. I then moved to Printers Row in 1978.
Gordon’s photography reflects who he is and where he has been. It has the no-nonsense South Side ethic with a big heart: black and white images of the last days of the original Maxwell Street market, the elderly Irving the Peanut Man at Old Comiskey Park in 1980, or the 1974 demolition of the Illinois Central Station in the South Loop.
“I used to believe that photography represented some truth,” Gordon said in a March 2024 phone interview from his home in Durham, N.C. “I guess it does, but it is subjective truth. It is your truth. Wherever you find a camera that becomes your truth. You’re making a selection of what to photograph, how to portray it, and how to give it meaning and story. A lot of my photographs are as much about me as they are about the subject matter.”
Ron Gordon was born on Dec. 15, 1942. He graduated from Bowen High School in South Chicago, the same place that produced jazz drummer Gene Krupa. Gordon’s father Hy was a watchmaker and his brothers were in the jewelry business. Hy operated a small shop in a bank building on 53rd Street in Hyde Park. Gordon’s mother Rosaline worked with her husband in the shop, sometimes as a bookkeeper.
“I thought 91st and Commercial was downtown until I was a teenager,” Gordon reflected. “A community of neighborhoods. A scale of buildings that weren’t skyscrapers. That shaped my sensibility. I thought that’s the way cities should be. They should be walkable. You could go shopping down the street from where you lived. I lived in a house at 8501 South Jeffery Avenue. Our backyard had pheasants. This was before the Skyway was built (in 1958). It was prairie. It was a substantial neighborhood. They didn’t start building there on large scale until the mid to late 1950s.
“I worked a lot of industrial jobs growing up. I worked in the Firestone store on 71st Street. I changed tires. Eddie Sosnowski and I could change four tires on a Chevy in eleven minutes. (Laughs.) That was our record. Tires were flying across the shop.”
Gordon’s older brother Robert studied architecture and city planning at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Between 1989 and 1991 he worked on Euro Disney in France and also worked on community planning projects for the City of Chicago under both Mayor Daleys and Harold Washington. Robert Gordon, who died in 2023, also authored several textbooks on perspective drawing. He designed a couple of Leon’s BBQ shops on the south side. “He was a big influence on me,” Gordon said.
Gordon’s father died when he was 11 years old. The event made him conscious of mortality and eventually led to his interest in documenting architecture going away. “Buildings are succumbing to time,” he said. “They no longer become useful. And the fact that my father was a watchmaker added to that.”
Gordon was on track to pursue languages and literature until the mid-1970’s when his ex-wife’s brother Michel Ditlove introduced him to photography. Ditlove studied design and photography at the Institute of Design (New Bauhaus.) “He was a commercial photographer who had a studio with giant strobe lights on 18 West Hubbard Street,” Gordon said. “He shot products and models. He shot a lot with a Hasselblad. He was in the same building that (architect) Harry Weese’s practice was in.” The space is now a boutique loft office building. Things change.
Ditlove gave Gordon a camera and taught him the basics of darkroom work. “I started shooting on my own,” Gordon said. “In 1974 I started shooting some of the (architectural) projects my brother was working on. I fell in love with photography. But I didn’t want to do commercial photography of cans of deodorant, things like that. I gave up my PhD. in English and French literature. I got divorced at the same time. That was also an element of my switching to photography as a career.”
Over his career, Gordon has broken down his charms of photography into five components:
1. “The Machines,” he said. “I loved the cameras, I loved the equipment, I loved the darkroom stuff. Enlargers. Lenses. Lights. I call that the machines.”
2. “The Chemistry.” This is the enchantment of the darkroom. “The film is taken out of the camera and developed in liquid chemicals, developer, stop bath, and fixer,” Gordon said. “It is washed, treated and then dried. It goes to the enlarger, projected onto a chemically coated paper and processed to more chemicals to museum standards.”
3. “The Aesthetics.” He explained,should be about composition, tone and art
4. “The Story.” “There’s the photographer’s story,” Gordon said. “The viewer’s picture. The story in the picture. Then a collection of photographs creates a bigger story.Because of my background in literature I love the storytelling of photography.”
5. “The Magic.” “When all those things came together (machines, chemistry, story, aesthetics) there was the magic of going out in the field. Putting a piece of the world on film and in the machine. Then take it back to the darkroom and put it through the chemistry. I could never wait. The film was still wet when I would unveil it and look at it that it actually came from the world into my darkroom.”
Gordon would grow anxious in the dark. He would unroll the film and presto! There’s images! “How does that work?,” Gordon asked with an eternal sense of wonder. “The first time I saw an image come up in the chemicals it was amazing.”
Ron’s first professional studio was in Pilsen in 1973. I then moved to Printers Row in 1978. Gordon opened his first darkroom in 1977 above Sandmeyer’s Bookstore, 714 S. Dearborn in Printer’s Row. A crew of four or five people worked in a 2,800-square foot space. “Imagine these loft buildings with porous floors,” Gordon said. “Having a dark room above a bookstore was not ideal. After spilling chemicals and water on the bookstore a few times I had to get out of there.”
In 1992 he decamped to Pilsen on the near south side. He had purchased a storefront building with an apartment upstairs. Gordon built a small darkroom and lab in the storefront. He lived upstairs. Gordon remained in Pilsen until 2016 when he moved to North Carolina.
Chicago photographer and writer Sandy Steinbrecher met in May 1989 at the wedding of Chicago photographers-lab technicians Amy Rothblatt and Oscar Moresi. “I started with Ron by processing film,” Steinbrecher said. “I must have processed thousands of rolls of film. Then I graduated to printing which is where I really learned the art and the craft of printing. When he moved to Pilsen we printed the Vivian Maier prints.” Gordon added, “Sandy became the brains of the studio. That was a relief for me. Nobody else wanted to take on that much responsibility.”
Vivian Maier (1926-2009) took more than 150,000 photographs in her lifetime. The New York City native spent much of her adult years as a nanny on Chicago’s North Shore. Her work was unknown until 2007 when Chicago collectors found prints and negatives in assorted boxes and
suitcases.
Gordon and Steinbrecher attended the first-ever Maier retrospective in January 2011 at the Chicago Cultural Center. Within the huge crowd they ran into photographer Paul Natkin. Natkin was talking to artist Jeff Goldstein who had a collection of 20,000 of Maier’s images. Natkin told Goldstein that if he wanted to make ‘real’ prints he should contact Gordon and Steinbrecher. Gordon recalled, “The printing was digital for that show and the prints weren’t very rich. But the imagery was sensational. Jeff wanted us to print the way things would have been printed in the era that Vivian Maier was working. Still, at the time I was thinking about retiring and doing something else.”
But Gordon and Steinbrecher embarked on making silver gelatin prints from the original Meier negatives for national and international exhibitions. Their work was printed to order. “You are printing in a darkroom with multiple chemical baths and toning,” Gordon explained. “Printing on paper that has a gelatin silver coating. You can open it in (amber) safelight which is light on the spectrum that doesn’t affect the paper. You put a negative in an enlarger and from the light it projects the negative on to the paper. It turns the negative positive and you process it through the chemicals. You archivally wash and tone it for a long time. Then you air dry it. We didn’t do anything else in the studio but these.” The prints were processed with archival materials and to museum standards. Every print was made by hand.
Between a 3 and 4 year period Gordon and Steinbrecher processed about 300 images from the Goldstein negatives. Some prints took longer than others. Steinbrecher said, “Everything is changing in the darkroom every time you run a print. The seconds on the timer might say ten seconds, but it might be slightly different. The temperature of the chemicals changes every time you put more paper through it. And the dilution changes strength every time. You’re constantly shifting what you’re doing to accommodate all these factors.
“It was a once-in-a -lifetime experience. She was with us all the time in the darkroom. We were seeing her images first, not that it was any different than anybody else seeing them next, but trying to make sense of where she was every day. She was a nanny, what she did in the morning. There were clues about what she did during the day, what she was thinking about and what she found interesting. It was trying to find her place in the world. It was always mysterious and its hard to say definitively ‘Oh, she’s ‘this.’ But the thing you can say for sure is that she was a great photographer. In some ways, she was disconnected from humanity but she connected in such an amazing way. She got it: her ‘hit rate’ and how good her stuff was.”
Gordon’s hit rate isn’t bad either.
His work covers everyday life in his beloved Chicago, old diners, and the atmosphere and fans around Old Comiskey Park (1910-1990.) “When I was a teenager I sold peanuts at the ballpark,” he said. “One time I sold 600 bags of peanuts during a double-header. Peanuts sold for 15 cents a bag and I got 20 percent. I made $18 and thought I was rich! I liked the flavor of the ballpark more than the game itself. There were guys there with 500, 800-millimeter lenses that could pinpoint a play. That was not my interest. I liked the fans. And the new stadium is facing the wrong direction. It should be facing downtown so you would see downtown from the batter’s box. In the beginning, you saw public housing (from home plate) which they have since demolished. By the way, I photographed that too.”
Gordon even took a black and white portrait of the colorful Express Grill, the 24-hour hot dog stand at 18th and Halsted two doors north of his place in Pilsen. Sometimes in the early morning hours people would sit on his front steps to eat their hot dogs. Sometimes they left garbage behind. “I once argued with someone about the garbage,” Gordon said. “Somebody got shot and killed on that corner after we left. Now the hot dog stand is closed. Pilsen got gentrified and that’s another thing that chased me away.”
Gordon’s work can be seen at rongordonphoto.com and books of his photographs include “Forgotten Chicago (Arcadia, 2004)” and “Printer’s Row, Chicago (Arcadia, 2003.) His images are also part of the Chicago History Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and The Art Institute of Chicago.
Gordon maintains a profound responsibility as a photographer. In June 1974 he drove past the 12th Street Depot of the Illinois Central as it was being torn down. The train station was the
end of the line for the Great Migration and it also was a place Gordon was familiar with from his trips to downtown from South Chicago. He grabbed his Crown Graphic camera and began shooting. The station was part of Gordon’s soul.
“I saw this beautiful building being destroyed,” he said. “And that station was just a bunch of wooden sticks at the end. They tear down beautiful buildings and build ugly buildings after that. Rebirth is part of Chicago’s theme. With the Salt Shed (Steinbrecher’s documentary project), they made something beautiful out of something beautiful, and something more useful for the demographics used now. It’s a circle of life.”
The Illinois Central project launched four decades of Gordon documenting the city’s buildings that were being demolished. In 1979 he made a series of photographs that depicted the end of the C&A Tap and the neighboring Reno’s restaurant at Dearborn and Polk. These were not historic landmarks or hipster taverns. They were signposts for everyday Chicagoans. “The head of the demolition company would ring the bell at my studio which was down the street,” Gordon said.
“He would come by when something significant was going to happen. I had painted three yellow dots on the sidewalk for my tripod and had my four-by-five camera set up. I’d grab it and run out to the street. One time while I was doing that a little kid asked me what I was doing. That was the first time I thought about it. I responded that if I didn’t do this nobody would ever know what was here.”
Gordon left Chicago for North Carolina because the weather was a little warmer and he was a little closer to his son in Brooklyn, N.Y. “And the taxes on my building in Pilsen doubled while I was in it,” he said. “There was no sign of it getting stabilized. I didn’t want to work just to pay taxes on my building.”
So how does Gordon view Chicago from a distance?
“Chicago is my first love,” he answered. “I lived in Pilsen on and off since 1973. I always lived in neighborhoods that were changing or about to change when I moved in. Printer’s Row was like that. I can’t keep photographing things going away. I take pictures in North Carolina but not as much. I don’t feel the necessity to do what I did in Chicago. I do it for fun. I walk trails and I’ve been working on the demolition of the woods in Durham. There’s a lot of decay and renewal with trees falling. But I don’t think it’s the Chicago ethos I carry with me. It’s my ethos that I carry with me.”
-Dave Hoekstra
-Photographer photo by Christine Benoodt
