The deeply sensitive Chicago photographer Howard Simmons never had time to think about a style of picture-making. For example, in 1968 Simmons was on assignment for Ebony magazine while walking around a rural neighborhood outside of Jackson, MS. He was with Charles Evers, the younger brother of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist who was assassinated in 1963 by a Ku Klux Klan member. In 1969 Charles Evers was elected mayor of Fayette, MS.
Simmons and Evers came across a shack when a Black child in diapers and a dirty white tee shirt suddenly emerged from the home. Ideas moved fast. “We didn’t think anybody lived there,” Simmons recalled in a December 2023 interview. “We just thought it was an abandoned shack. This baby peeked out, holding a pot. He’s behind a screen door. I only had one shot. An editorial photographer is like a gunslinger. The commercial photographer is like a sniper, where you set everything up, your scope and you aim. I consider that one of my classic photographs. And behind him there was a piece of material showing. And that was the dress of his mother.”
Ebony magazine ran “The Mississippi Baby” picture full page.
“I never thought about style,” he continued. “That’s interesting. It’s spontaneous except for commercial. In commercial photography, you have to have a specific approach. It is more mechanical. You’re working with a layout, how it is going to be used and what the clients need. Some commercial photographers like (Chicago’s) Dennis Manarchy shot eight by ten most of the time. Now I tell young photographers to go editorial and forget about commercial. AI is going to take over. They have an AI modeling agency now. They can put it together. They can make it out of stock photos. They can do it all. But they can’t do that Mississippi baby.”
Simmons has thrived in the worlds of commercial and editorial photography.
He was born June 11, 1943 in Pittsburgh, PA. His father Luther Simmons was as colorful as a Kodak slide carousel. He worked in house painting. He was a mail-order physical therapist. He was a mandolin player who led Luther Simmons and the Dixie Brownies. “I learned in the last 15 years that he had a healing service with a tent and the whole bit,” Simmons said. “He wore a turban. He was laying hands on this woman in a wheelchair and she got up and walked. He dropped everything and walked away. It scared him to death. He would see this woman in Pittsburgh and he would walk the other way. But I had a fairy tale dad. He got me into model airplanes and model trains. On the train layout, he built a little town with six buildings. And he built them out of matchsticks. That has helped me now, building things around the house. I could build things in my photography studio and I can fix things for my grandkids.”
Luther was married to Lillian Drayton. “My Mom called him ‘Buddy’,” Simmons said. “He called her ‘Pal.’ That was their nicknames.” Luther’s middle name was Howard. so their son became Howard Drayton Simmons. He said, “My oldest daughter found the Drayton
Plantation, so that’s a slave name.”
Simmons married Marva Eileen Randolph in 1968, the same year he launched his photojournalism career at Ebony. A second-generation Buddy and Pal have three daughters between the ages of 47 and 54. Family is more important to Simmons than his photography.
Youngest daughter Christie Edwards is CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) Program Manager at the Rush University Medical Center. Middle daughter Tracey McGhee is self-employed and former district sales manager for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. And oldest daughter Robbin Simmons is an Emmy-winning weekend anchor and reporter at WSVN-TV in Miami, Fl.
McGhee is archiving and sorting her father’s negatives. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said. “When we get together I like to stand back and see the girls. They all have Master’s Degrees. The girls call themselves ‘The Simmons Womens.’ I’m so proud of my girls. I talk to strangers at the bus stop about them. And my wife is very religious. She’s been that way from the time I met her. Once we were at a restaurant out of town and this young man comes up to her out of the blue and asked what church she attended.”
Once you begin to grasp Simmons’ belief in family you understand the power of his photography.
He sees the family of man.
“My archives are my negatives,” he explained. “I have thousands of my family. I photographed my family throughout our history--my youngest daughter being born, my wife in labor. They’re not just snapshots. I shot my family in candid situations. The majority of them are black and white. It has been suggested I do a book called ‘An American Family.’ There’s all sorts of situations. When my first daughter was born and we were going to the hospital my wife was practically in labor. I put the camera on self-timer on top of the car and had us walking to St. Joseph’s Hospital. We shot our own Christmas cards. For Star Wars, we set up a Star Wars set and my wife made the gowns.” In 1980 Simmons shot the cover for the first edition of Black Family Magazine. He used his family for the studio picture.
Simmons graduated from Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh, PA. the same school that produced jazz pianists Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal and NBA star Maurice Stokes. Immediately after high school Simmons enlisted in the U.S. Air Force where he played French horn with Air Force service bands. He became interested in photography in the Air Force and when he was discharged in 1966 he began working for Jack Judge Studios in Pittsburgh aiming to become a commercial photographer. A year later he decided to roll the dice with Ebonymagazine in Chicago, the crown jewel of Black publications. He had never been to Chicago. He had a modest portfolio.
“I flew from Pittsburgh with no resume,” he said. “No reservation. They had a writer look at my portfolio. Then they let the managing editor Herb Nipsen look at my work. (Nipsen also hired photographer Robert Natkin, the late father of Paul Natkin.) I came in the next day and they hired me. Then imagine when I went back home and said, ‘Ebony magazine!’”
Simmons became an on-the-road photographer for Ebony. He covered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in Atlanta and Corretta Scott King’s “Solidarity Day” rally in June, 1968 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. On a tip from his good friend, Sun-Times photographer Bob Black, he was hired at the Sun-Times in late 1968. Simmons remained at the Sun-Times until 1976 when he returned to commercial photography as an independent contractor.
“There was some racism at the paper,” he said. “One time chimpanzees were born in a zoo. Someone stuck the pictures up in the dark room with a hint of something. I had a little sermon. I stood up and said some things that weren’t very nice. And the picture came down. Let me add that I changed the dress code. Everybody wore shirts and ties.”
Simmons pointed to his snug turtle neck and said, “I’ve been wearing this forever. I said that when Mr. Dedmon (Emmett Dedmon, vice-president and editorial director of the Sun-Times) hired me I was wearing a turtle neck and if you don’t like it, talk to Mr. Dedmon. Pretty soon all the photographers at all the newspapers stopped wearing shirts and ties.”
Bob Black added, “Howard brought in another thing at the Sun-Times because it never came up. It was assumed you had your own car. He didn’t have car. He did a lot of out-of-town assignments at Ebony, renting cars whenever he needed one.” Simmons recalled, ‘They said we have to get a radio in your car.’ I said, ‘I don’t have a car.’ (laughing).” So the Sun-Times leased a car for Simmons. Black continued, “As a result everyone wanted a leased car. They didn’t want to use their car. I think I got one leased car before they did away with the program. Howard turned the place upside down!”
As Simmons drove around Chicago and its neighboring towns, he saw the trials of daily living. “I didn’t know there were such downtrodden communities outside of Chicago,” he said. “Like around Robbins. They still had outhouses. I go, ‘Wow, I shot that?’ That was very early when I was at the Sun-Times.”
The Simmons family was one of the first Black families to settle in west suburban Oak Park. They had been in the Chicago area for less than two years and never heard of Oak Park. The subject of a Sun-Times assignment in Oak Park encouraged Simmons to buy a home in the community as part of the effort to encourage minorities to move to the village. “We were only married a couple of years when we bought a home in 1970 with the Oak Park Housing Center,” he said. “And the (two-story brick) house was owned by the owners of Zimmerman Liquors. We were the first African Americans on the block. All our girls grew up in the same home. They called our family ‘The Black Brady Bunch’. Our family was that kind of family.”
In 1987 Simmons had purchased a warehouse on North Avenue in Wicker Park. He turned most of the building into his studio. He shot ads for Sears, Schlitz Malt Liquor, and others in his space. “I couldn’t maintain it and had to leave it,” he said. “I left a number of my images there. The guy actually wouldn’t let me back in the studio after his mother bought the building. I didn’t make a big deal about it which may seem strange. A young man (Dave Mata) went there looking for (vinyl) records and he found mounted photographs, some of them pretty large. They were maybe 20 photographs, not negatives.”
The photographs included images of Dizzy Gillespie, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and one from 1973 that featured four Black photographers perched on the steps of the South Side Community Arts Center. Those photographers were Bob Black, John H. White, Ovie Carter---and Simmons. “The young man found out who I was,” Simmons said. “He called me and brought them out to my house. He had a friend (Leah Pietrusiak) who wrote for the Reader. So she did a (2010) story on how Howard got his history back. But I have more interesting stories than that.”
But what was interesting about the found treasures were the pictures Simmons had taken to accompany stories for WMAQ-TV (Channel 5.) These included a 1985 portrait of Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till that was used for a Channel 5 story and a young reporter Mark Giangreco with the 1984 Cubs at Wrigley Field. They are nuanced and evocative. “When I shot these ads they were made to look like editorial,” he said. “They were pictures for the story. It was fun to shoot ads for Channel 5 because there were a lot of famous people like Mike Ditka.” Simmons tried to make his assignments as real-life as possible.
Simmons told the Reader he had to photograph a bag lady for a Channel 5 story on homelessness. The station was unable to find such a person on deadline so they dressed up a model in shabby clothes and had her hold some bags. Simmons recalled, “Carol Marin said, ‘Where’d you find her? I want to interview her.” Once Simmons built a replica neighborhood tavern in his studio on a commercial assignment for Stroh’s beer. Another time he built a small grocery store for a Coca-Cola ad.
During the mid-1980s at his 5,000-square-feet studio at Chicago and Orleans, Simmons took a spontaneous shot of Michael Jordan in a suit with hair, laughing and holding a Coca-Cola can. It wasn’t an ad. “Another night Michael stopped by the studio just to say hello,” Simmons recalled. Simmons was taking care of a friend’s pet iguana that was at least 20 inches long. “It scared him to death,” Simmons said with a laugh. “He said he hated reptiles. He moonwalked out of the office. How important is it to have a profession that is so much fun?’ And it can be a life-changing experience. I think of the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made. I’ve had an interesting life. I’m so fortunate. I say that a lot.”
By Dave Hoekstra
