Eric Futran was a beloved Chicago photographer who felt the heartbeat of every point in time. Work hard. Sing hard. Love hard. The rhythm of life. And the bright moments endure. Eric’s portfolio spanned from the early years of the Chicago Reader newspaper---in the late 1970s, he caught Tom Waits lost behind a stein of beer at the Quiet Knight music club--to documenting Chicago’s historic soul food restaurants.
In the early 2000s, Eric began writing folk songs and formed a klezmer band at the Old Town School of Folk Music. He had a relentless sense of humor and called himself “Kid Knish.” He loved Hawaiian shirts, his bouzouki (Greek stringed instrument) and his family.
Eric died on Jan. 19, 2024, after several years of contending with Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia. He was 75 years old. Mike Lenehan, the former Reader executive editor and writer announced Eric’s passing in a Facebook post. He wrote, “In the Reader’s early days, and ours, he and I were journo bros, going out to do stories about truck drivers, wrestlers, car kids. It was a collaboration and a friendship that I will always treasure.”
Eric Futran never had a detailed obituary. Until now.
In an August, 2024 phone conversation Lenehan looked back to the early 1970s. “Unlike the later Reader days when you’d bring in your story and we’d get a photographer to cover it, he and I went on things together,” Lenehan said. “We clicked. I liked his sense of humor. He made my stories look good. If we had to drive out to some godforsaken place you could have a good conversation and have a beer later. We socialized a bit. We considered ourselves a team. His first wife, or girlfriend, I can’t remember, but it was the first time I heard the term ‘male bonding’ when she described what we did, rolling her eyes. I can’t deny it. He was a good guy. What more could you want?” What more do you want in our short dance on this stage? Be good.
Eric’s survivors include his wife Laura Molzahn, a former editor and dance and theater writer for the Reader, stepsons Robert and Daniel, the children of his late wife Susan. Later, she and Eric had children of their own, Rachael and Jake. “When Susan died (of cancer) in 1990 he did the best to care for everyone,” Laura wrote in an August 2024 e-mail. “Eventually that included me and my daughter Jocelyn. Her dad died when she was ten.
“Eric had the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever known.”
Eric Futran was born on Dec. 18, 1948, in Hollywood Ca. to Ada and Herbert Futran. Herbert was a radio script writer who developed shows like 1949’s “The Adaptative Ultimate,” about a young girl given an experimental serum who becomes a monster. He became friends with Chicago radio legend-cultural historian Studs Terkel. They were both champions of worker’s rights.
Tom Leeds is a retired Clark County Family Court Hearing Master in Nevada. Leeds met Eric when they were both 13 years old. Leeds lived in Evanston and the Futran family was in Rogers Park. They connected through their love of blues, rock n’ roll, Fluky’s hot dogs, and Sunday mornings on the real Maxwell Street.
“His father was blacklisted during the McCarthy era,” Leeds said in an August 2024 interview from Henderson, NV. “Eric lived through that. They moved to Chicago. His father became an industrial writer and they lived in a small apartment in a lower-middle-class section of Rogers Park. When I’d go to Eric’s house he told me how his father was blacklisted and they used to have money and they didn’t anymore. He was just a child.”
In a September 2024 conversation from her home in Espanola, N.M., Eric’s niece Lauren Reichelt added, “Papa (Herbert) really wanted to work in TV but got blacklisted before that could happen. Papa never recovered from it. He suffered from serious depression all the time I knew him. When he first came to Chicago he had to work as a liquor store delivery man. He also developed Alzheimer’s when he was fairly young.” Herbert died in 1982 in Chicago at the age of 74.
Meanwhile, Leeds had enlisted Eric as lead singer and harmonica player of Early Times, their high school band which included John Burns, who later became lead guitarist for John Prine. All the band members went to Evanston Township, except for Eric, who attended Sullivan High School. Eric was also a defensive lineman on the Sullivan football team. “I sent pictures of the band to the Chicago American and Evanston Review in 1966, our senior year,” Leeds said. “At what was to be our greatest gig, playing for a Northwestern fraternity party, setting up next to another party which hired (the soul outfit) Baby Huey and the Babysitters, we were carded by Musicians Local 10 and shut down.”
Eric later transferred his love of football into playing for the Red Barons, named for the Red Baron Pub in Lincoln Park. One year someone stole their uniforms and equipment. Reichelt recalled, “He was at Maxwell Street, probably taking pictures, and he actually saw them (uniforms) being sold and confronted the sellers.”
Leeds remembered that Eric got his start in the early 1970s as a “sidewalk photographer” in Chicago. “He was one of those people that stood on the street corner and took pictures as people were walking by,” Leeds recalled. “They would give them an envelope with the picture. They could buy the photograph. It could have been downtown Chicago, it could have been the ballparks. He did that when he got out of the Navy.”
Reichelt still calls Eric “Uncle Ricky” as a riff off his Eric name. Reichelt was in the first graduating class at Whitney Young High School (1978.) She decamped to New Mexico where she met her husband and started New Mexico’s first county run health and human services department. Her now-retired husband Richard Reichelt was a systems analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “My mother (Theodora), Eric’s older sister, was mentally ill,” Reichelt explained. “When I was six my mom had her first psychotic break.” The family was living in Schenectady, NY. Reichelt had one younger brother and two younger sisters. “We all went to live with my Grandma in Chicago,” she said. “She had like a two or three bedroom apartment. Uncle Ricky was living there. He was 17. It was a bit much to have these children suddenly descending on him so he joined the Navy.”
Leeds kept in touch with Eric when he was stationed in the Carolinas with the U.S. Navy in 1969-70, attended Northern Illinois University for a year, and when he struggled to make ends meet in tiny apartments on Wilson Avenue. Eric moved forward to study photography at Columbia College on the GI Bill.
While attending Columbia, Eric sold flowers to support himself near the S-curve on inner Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue. He had the magic to slow down traffic. “I’d go to work with Grandma and we’d stop and buy flowers from him,” Reichelt said. “He was a big fan of the street. He liked people-watching. He was definitely a city boy. He was constantly walking around Chicago taking pictures of people in Grant Park, Lincoln Park, kids sitting on their door stoops.”
Eric’s fortitude blossomed into a gig as one of the first photographers at the Chicago Reader in 1973. The Reader was founded on Oct. 1, 1971. Lenehan said, “I never knew he was in the Navy. I didn’t know he went to Columbia College. I don’t know where he was born. Now flash forward 20, 30 years and Laura Molzahn is calling. She is somebody I’ve known for a long time. My wife went to Carleton College (in Northfield, Mn.) and was part of the Carleton College mafia (Bob Roth, Tom Rehwaldt, Bob McCamant and Nancy Banks) that started the Reader. Laura was part of the Carleton College thing. Her first husband was also a Carleton guy and delivered Reader papers on Thursdays to make extra cash. So Laura calls out of the blue and says she’s dating this guy named Eric Futran and she wants to know if he’s a good guy.”
Things clicked. Laura recalled their first dates. “He was so open,” she said during a mid-September conversation in a north side coffee shop. “He was funny. He was just himself and didn’t worry about it. He was just Eric. I liked food but not like Eric did. He saw the sensuality of food. He was good at taking pictures of his kids. He was a kid.” Lenehan said, “We started to hang out in the 1990s. Eric has gone on to do a myriad of things, he’s got a family, he’s trying to make money and he’s not doing much at the Reader.”
In 1984 Eric had connected with John Shoup, the executive producer of the “Great Chefs” series that debuted on PBS. For the next 13 years he traveled the globe with Shoup’s video crew making stills for the cookbooks that accompanied the series. Eric applied a documentarian’s eye towards the kitchen. The food was just one element. “I was taken by the gestalt of the kitchen and the whole art form,” Eric told Laura Levy Shatkin in a June, 2000 Reader profile. “I’ve always been hung up on capturing the culinary arts as a craft.”
He photographed in barnyards, packing houses and fancy pants restaurants. Over the 1980s and 1990s Eric’s clients grew to include magazines like Restaurant and Institution and Cook’s Gazette, artisanal producers and fast food chains. Each project was approached with respect.
By 1999 the Chicago Cultural Center commissioned Eric to create the exhibit “Grits, Greens and Everything In Between: The Foods of the African Diaspora and American Transformations” as part of the Culinary Historians of Chicago conference. Eric devoted eight months to making pictures in legacy soul food restaurants like Army & Lou’s on East 75th Street, Heaven on Seven in the Loop and Gladys’ Luncheonette on South Indiana. It remains important work because Eric’s empathetic eye gives those places of Chicago culture eternal substance. They have all closed.
Long time Chicago photographer (and curator of this archive) Paul Natkin didn’t meet Eric until 2009. Natkin and a group of 30 other photographers formed the Chicago Photography Collective and in late 2009 they opened a pop-up gallery in downtown Chicago. “We’d see each other at the Reader when we were dropping off prints,” Natkin said. “There was nothing formal about it. We knew each other’s names because all photographers look at photographs. But I didn’t know him.” Natkin learned fast, due in part to Eric’s big personality.
“Eric was motivated by music and food,” Natkin said. “His sense of humor! If his jokes were half as funny as he thought they were. But some were funny. People wanted to hang out with him. He was just a nice guy. That had to help greatly in the photography world. He took a picture of (the late acclaimed Chicago chef) Charlie Trotter and he made Charlie Trotter look like somebody that actually wanted to have his picture taken. Every picture I’ve seen of Charlie Trotter he looked like he was ready to kill the photographer. Not with Eric. He went into food photography 100 per cent. He became the best food photographer in Chicago as far as I’m concerned. He could take a plate of food and make it look like a work of art. He tapped into something that was missing in Chicago. He shot food in a natural setting.”
Eric was Fern Bogot’s teacher around 2000 when she took a food photography class at Kendall College, then located in Evanston. “I was about to start working at a restaurant I was about to open,” she said. “Ina’s downtown on Randolph Street. I learned to shoot from above and get your lighting right. He was a personable teacher. He went around to everyone. He was very positive. No one in the class was a horrible photographer. It was a culinary school. Every person’s desire was to be an executive chef at their own restaurant which was ridiculous. They wanted to learn how to take better photos for their websites, menus or whatever.”
Eric looked beyond the subject. That was his gift. “If you look at his photos they’re not really food photos,” Bogot said. It’s not a picture of spaghetti and meatballs with a piece of bread on the side. It is loaves of bread, forks in a box, it’s the glasses hanging from the rims. Something more arty.”
Bogot was so inspired by Eric she helped organize his May 13 2024 memorial at the southern style Wishbone diner in Chicago’s South Loop. She remembered how Eric liked to wear a Wishbone tee-shirt. “Nobody knew he died,” she said. “The only way we knew is because Mike Lenehan put it on Facebook.” Bogot and Natkin went through Eric’s archives from 2011 forward and selected 125 photographs that ran in a video loop during the memorial.
Music soothed Eric’s soul, a muse that drew from his teenage days in Rogers Park. At his memorial his friends and family sang along to the 19th Century Salvation Army hymn “Roll The Old Chariot.” Eric always volunteered for the solo. Hs always set the tone.
Eric and Laura were in the Community Choir at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Rebecca Toon is the long-time voice teacher at the Old Town School. She loved Eric’s solos. “I knew I could trust him,” she said in a mid-September 2024 interview. “It’s never about a great singer you are or a prestige thing. It’s a way of sharing our voices with each other.”
Eric understood community.
“He embedded himself in the Old Town School,” Natkin said. “He took pictures of musicians. And kids in Wiggleworms learning how to play guitar. Old people learning how to play guitar. A line of banjos in their store. Astounding. He would shoot like a hundred rolls of film. He overdid it, but I have all those pictures on a hard drive. And every one of them is exquisite. Toon--such a great name for a voice teacher--met Eric in 2004 in the school’s klezmer class. “I had just started teaching at Old Town,” she said. “He was there playing his bouzouki really loud. His personality took over.” Eric took a gypsy jazz class with Toon and then Laura and Eric took choir class together.
Toon remembered the choir being nervous about attire during one of their first shows. She said, ‘It was I don’t want to wear all black, I don’t want to be too formal, let’s say solid color top and dark pants.’ Eric always wore Hawaiian shirts. And he came in wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
“What I absolutely loved about him was that he was himself. It never felt threatening to me. It felt honest. That’s exactly the kind of thing I wanted in the choir. He was a positive presence, even at the end. Until the last few months Laura was bringing him. He couldn’t sing but he would sit there with her.
“It was really nice to see him in the room.”
Pete Jannotta is an Old Town School student and fiddle player who was a proud member of Eric’s band Kid Knish and the Mavens in 2015. “I always enjoyed playing with him,” Jannotta said in a September, 2024 conversation. “He appreciated the soul of others. I felt he was happy to play music with me and never be judgmental.”
In May 2012 the Old Town School hosted a photo exhibit of Eric’s work titled “Keeping the Faith on a Crooked Road.” Jannotta said, “ I was honored when he asked several of his musician friends to play the opening of his exhibit. He was a lover. He felt everybody’s heart. I guess that’s the best way to put it.”
Eric once formed a band called the Noshers that only performed food-related songs. Their repertoire included Steve Goodman’s “Chicken Cordon Blues” and Eric’s signature composition “Shake That Chicken Fat.” Jannotta recalled Eric’s tune “Belly Like a Buddah” which was about having a stomach a little too large to fit into blue jeans. “It was almost bluesy,” he said. “He liked to get into the bluesy side. He loved music in minor keys. The klezmer stuff was definitely a favorite.” Eric formed another outfit called the Chicken Fat Klezmer Orchestra. He also enjoyed covering Woody Guthrie’s light-hearted “Mail Myself to You.” Reichelt said, “I loved it! I made him sing that every time I saw him.”
Jannotta is a semi-retired colorist/restorationist in television post-production. He met Eric at the Old Town School but never took a class with him. “Our biggest common connection would be the Independence Park Farmer’s Market (on the north side of Chicago),” Jannotta said. “There’s a jam there every two weeks. Eric would come quite often.” Natkin added, “Part of me was ‘Why are you doing this (music), you’re never going to make any money doing it,’ But Eric loved doing it. And he wrote good songs.”
Like the musician who knows what notes not to play, good photographers recognize the value of space. Natkin remembered Eric’s keen sense of composition. “He wouldn’t put everybody in the middle of the frame,” Natkin explained. “ People that are not professionals tend to do that. You need to have a sense of tension.” Lenehan did not recall Eric being defined by a certain style of shooting. “He would go his way and I would go mine,” he said. “He would see what interested him in the story. He wasn’t a portrait guy. He was looking for the scene and the action. He could see very well in black and white. Nobody was successful at the Reader who couldn’t see very well in black and white.”
In the 1990s Eric established The Futran Studio with his wife Susan on the north side of Chicago. After she was diagnosed with brain cancer, Eric created the ARC Gallery exhibit “Death of a Woman” which chronicled the last two months of Susan’s life. Eric told the Chicago Tribune, “Early on we agreed to take photographs. As a photographer it was something I had to do. If I hadn’t it would have been criminal...But there is strength, beauty and dignity. It’s a tribute.” To underscore the depths of the illness, medical bills and letters from insurance companies were hung among the photographs.
His life-long friend Leeds said, “One picture I remember from Eric is from Susan’s illness. It is a black and white of her hand next to a rose. It is very moving.” Reichelt added, “He just escaped into his photography and he took pictures of her. I remember the hand picture. Before Susan, he had a wife Nancy Jo Berg. They divorced and she died of MS.”
Lenehan said the last time he saw Eric was on Oct. 14, 2022 for a BeauSoliel country-Creole concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music. “We didn’t go together but it was music we both liked,” he said. “When we sat down we saw Laura and Eric. He was still able to enjoy the music but he was pretty far out of it. I made it a point to chat him up. I was trying to make him comfortable. I was hoping to be someone familiar.”
Eric’s giving spirit will forever uplift this Chicago Photo Collection project.
Over a long lunch a few years before his death Futran told Natkin he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. At the same time, Natkin had birthed a conversation about archiving photographer’s work--especially older photographers--with Lionel Rabb, Director of the Ed Paschke Art Center in Jefferson Park. Rabb knew the late civil rights-portrait photographer Steve Schapiro and Natkin knew Futran. “There was nothing planned so I never said anything to Eric,” Natkin said. “I can’t say something and have it not happen. He absolutely inspired this project. That started the question, ‘What’s going to happen to your stuff when you die?’
Many of Eric’s negatives were presumed lost. “But he had a backup hard drive that had like 20 years of his work on it,” Natkin said. “Laura saved that. I was under the impression they were all gone and there was no record of his life whatsoever.”
But Eric paid attention. All the time. At one time Laura was taking a vocal tech class at the Old Town School. A student sang Tom Waits’ 2005 ballad “You Can Never Hold Back Spring” in class. The song is about the hope of changing seasons, especially in a place like Chicago.
Eric, Laura, and the student were also in the school’s choir. Eric heard about “You Can Never Hold Back Spring” and soon Laura brought a print of his Waits portrait to give to the student. She loved it. “It meant a lot to her,” Toon said. “Eric was a generous person. He was one of those people that you just carry with you.”---Dave Hoekstra
