Long-time Chicago photographer John Sundlof works from an ethical heart and an eye for detail. In 2016 he self-published a delightful book “On The Line/Out To Dry” that documented people with their clothes blowing in the wind on outside laundry lines.
It is poetry in motion.
Sundlof deployed his background as a door-to-door salesman to approach strangers at their homes in Chicago, Wyoming, Ireland, India (a temple mistress), Michigan, and other spots. Sundlof’s color portraits were taken from 1993 to 2016. The pitch had to be fast. “I was used to knocking on people’s doors,” Sundlof said over a May 2024 lunch at the Boulevard Bistro in Bucktown. “If the laundry was interesting enough I knock on their door. A lot of it happened out in the country.”
Sundlof, his wife Margaret, and their three children vacationed at a dude ranch in Buffalo, WY. During down time Sundlof drove around looking for subjects. One of his earliest images was of a gentleman named Lee, whose eyes are closed and arms are outstretched in a crucifix-like pose with a backdrop of puffy clouds and breezy laundry. It became the cover of the 115-page book, edited by writer and former Chicago Reader editor Mike Lenehan.
“The laundry is better when it is blowing in the wind,” Sundlof explained. “It creates a backdrop that suggests anything. I’ve always shot whatever I wanted. I realized I would never get anybody to publish a book with this theme. So I did it myself. Joel Meyerowitz is a good
photographer from the East Coast who did a (1991) book called ‘Redheads.’ He shot them all with a view camera. He had a theme. (Chicago photographer) Lloyd (De Grane’s) book about people watching television; that’s fantastic.
“I never know what’s coming out the door. He (Lee) was a nice guy. I said, ‘You have a beautiful line over there and now I see you at the door and that will make a great picture.’ That was a general closing line (no pun intended) to get people to agree to a picture. You approach people at their level. Don’t wear sunglasses. Don’t talk to them from your car” Sundlof would generally negotiate a model release in return for a print or a fee.
Sundlof was only turned down twice. He preferred windy days for his book which features 92 beautiful images. “I would go kicking and screaming into using a tripod,” he said. “I liked to move around. You can’t do that with a tripod. To take pictures in Chicago, I put an ad in the Reader, something like ‘hang out to dry? Get a free portrait of you and your family.’ I got a young woman (Rebecca) from the north side who was a UPS driver. She called me and said, ‘I don’t hang my clothes on the line but I hang my lingerie.’ I had to dress the set and that’s not my deal. If it were I would have had a better commercial career. So I dressed the set with her panties and her teddies. While I was in the midst of doing so I thought to myself, She should be
wearing one of these.”
Immediately upon turning around Rebecca was standing there and said ‘I should wear one of these for the shot.’ She lived with her ex-boyfriend Greg in Chicago. “For my generation that was hard to figure out,” Sundlof said. “So I shot her in the doorway with these things hanging around with her ex-boyfriend who was on the porch looking in through the glass.”
John Sundlof was born on October 7, 1953, in Fort Belvoir, VA. “Belvoir” means “beautiful view” in French, so perhaps Sundlof was destined to become a photographer. His father William (1915-1982) was a U.S. Army Colonel who graduated from West Point. The family moved between Virginia and Stuttgart, Germany until 1962 when Colonel Sundlof retired. The Colonel and wife Mary Evelyn Cleary returned to the Chicago area. They were both
New Trier graduates. Mary Evelyn’s father was James Mansfield Cleary (1887-1972) who worked in advertising and promotion for the Chicago Tribune and helped launch the New York Daily News. Cleary was also involved in the embryonic years of WGN radio. According to the 1961 book “WGN: A
Pictorial History” in 1924 Cleary drafted Quin A. Ryan from the Tribune. Ryan became one of the earliest voices of the station, covering the 1934 Union Stock Yards fire and becoming the first announcer to provide live coverage of the Kentucky Derby and a regular-season baseball game.
John Sundlof married Margaret Long, his high school sweetheart at New Trier East in Winnetka, Il. They both graduated in 1971. They have been married 47 years and they have three children: Anna, 43, is married with three kids and teaches pre-school art in Chicago. Carolyn, 40, is a CPS teaching coach and tutor with two children. She also sang for ten years with the Chicago Symphony Chorus and received a 2010 Grammy Award for Verdi’s Requiem led by
Riccardo Muti. And Patrick, 35, is a musician and luthier for Sundlof Musical Engineering. He lives in a Chicago two-flat he purchased with Carolyn.
Sundlof remembers Grandfather Jim taking lots of pictures of family members visiting their home. He rounded up, directed, and shot through the Speed Graphic Camera that debuted in 1912 out of Rochester, N.Y. “He was rougher taking pictures than he was as a normal grandfather sitting there,” Sundlof said. “No introverted photographer can take a picture of a group of people. You have to be like a choir director.”
Sundlof took a photography course during his senior year at New Trier East. He was taught by the visual artist Joyce Neimanas who went on to become chair of the photography department at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. “Photography is extremely easy to learn,” he said. “Long depth of field, short depth of field. Drag the shutter. Stuff like that. It is in the doing of it that real growth comes. Every week at New Trier you had to do something different. Every week we had a critique of everybody’s stuff and that’s where I feel she did everybody a service. She taught us how to really critically look at images.” Sundlof’s first camera was his father’s Fujica which he used for his high school course. He then bought a Pentax and graduated to Canon FTb. “My girlfriend, now wife, had one,” he explained.
That got me into the Canon line upgrading to the F-1s and filling out the lenses. I didn’t go to digital until 2004. I couldn’t afford to upgrade every two or three years which was necessary until then. I sold all my film stuff. I sold my (high-end) Hasselblad stuff. I bought my gear used but over most of my career it was like an investment. I could sell it for more than I paid for it - until ,of course, I finally had to sell it at a loss. ”
In 1975 Sundlof obtained a degree in German Literature at Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. He also became photo editor of the student newspaper. “I had no desire to shoot or respect for newspaper images, I just wanted access to a darkroom.” he said. “(Henri) Cartier-Bresson was one of my favorites. He was editorial but a lot of his images were also surreal. I had had one course at New Trier and that was it.
After college Sundlof spent six weeks as a door-to-door insurance salesman around Appleton. “That was valuable,” he said. “I had already sold Fuller Brush in high school. Then I worked for (Chicago businessman) W. Clement Stone selling insurance to door. I had to go to sales school for two weeks in Oshkosh. I went back to Wisconsin because I wanted to study with my voice teacher. My first inclination was to be an opera singer.”
When Sundlof was in the second grade in Virginia his aunt sent him two sets of records. One was music from the Union, such as the toe-tapping “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and the tear jerking “Just Before the Battle, Mother” and the other was from the Confederacy,which included the anthem “Dixie.” “The two sets contained documents, letters and pictures (Matthew Brady and others) from the war,” he said. “And the recordings were by first class singers. I considered myself a Yankee since both my parents were from Chicago.” But this gift sparked two interests at once: photography and singing.” Sundlof sang baritone in ten productions with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, including “Aida” with Luciano Pavarotti in 1983. He was with the opera from 1981 until 1994. “I sang with them on and off. I was in the supplementary chorus. If they did a big opera I would get hired.”
By 1977 Sundlof had found work as a steel import specialist and licensed customs house broker at Quast & Co. in Chicago until 1988 when he decided to pursue photography with a passion. “I had to promote myself,” he said. “I looked into black and white offset printers. I found out about the place that printed (Chicago) Reader calendars. I said, ‘I gotta’ shoot for the Reader’.”
Sundlof had been working with darkroom manipulation ala “Gerry Uelsmann (1934-2022) since college. I combined images in the darkroom,” Sundlof said. Uelsmann morphed black and white pictures into surreal montages. “That’s what I liked the most about photography when I got into it,” Sundlof said. He first dabbled in photoshop at the Reader. “I did the Reader and I had other jobs. I was calling on ad agencies, Chicago magazine and other places. In 1988 I really got into shooting features for the Reader.”
Illinois Senator Paul Simon was running for president in 1988. Sundlof bought a page in “Corporate Showcase,” a New York-based directory, and decided to do a portrait of Simon. Sundlof followed Simon with an assistant to Michigan. Simon was known for his trademark bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses. “I wanted to show this technique of a black and white shot where only his skin and of course his (maroon bow) tie was color,” Sundlof said. “Now it’s
easy to do with Photoshop. Back then it was difficult, you had to use oils and stuff like that. We set up a studio against a canvas background in a hotel murphy bed suite. My assistant and I slept on the floor so as not to disturb the set up.”
But Simon’s staff person was unsure if he would make the shoot because of a 7 a.m. flight the next day. Sundlof promised donuts and coffee and a commitment of just 15 minutes. He also persisted. “I wrote a note and slid it under his hotel door,” Sundlof said. “Then I called him at
six in the morning. He said, ‘All right.’ Simon was there for eight minutes and I took eleven shots and what made me happy was that he didn’t give me one of those politician smiles. I wanted something very straight forward. But he was stone. I was saying all kinds of embarrassing things about myself just to get him to adjust his pose or expression. Nothing worked so I asked him to fold his arms which I call the executive fold. Ever so slightly his
expression adjusted.
Sundlof showed the Simon portrait to Reader editor and art director Robert McCamant and told him the backstory. McCamant trusted him for more assignments and Sundlof’s work started appearing in the weekly about four times a month. Sundlof again put his sales skills into play when 13 of his images were exclusively featured on the 1989 Reader calendar---including a gritty portrait of five striking Chicago Tribune pressmen on Michigan Avenue. “That helped me a lot,” he said. “I wasn’t getting paid that much so I negotiated that ‘I give you 500 pre-printed addresses with my 3 x 4 logo, would you send those out?’ McCamant agreed to it. It’s the little things.
When I was shooting sometimes I would use the ‘assumptive close.’ The spiel we did in an accident policy was that “we’re going to pay you if you get hurt, we will even pay if your feelings are hurt, how’s that? (laughed). In the assumptive close instead of asking for the sale, you just go ahead and say, ‘How do you spell your last name?’ And start writing out the information, turn it over to them, and have them sign right there.”
Sundlof left the Reader in 1994. He found ample work at advertising agencies, the American Medical Association, and editorial for Land’s End, including a portrait of the company’s one millionth turtleneck customer adorned in a turtleneck. Between 2008 and 2012 Sundlof donated his services to “Flashes of Hope,” a national organization that arranges photo sessions in hospitals for children and their families battling cancer. Photographers set up a studio on site or if some kids are not well enough to leave their room the photographers visit them. Flashes of Hope also has a roster of volunteer stylists.
Sundlof is retired and living with his wife in Wilmette. From 2019 to 2022 he took improv comedy classes at Second City, the Annoyance Theatre and the iO Theater (formerly Improv Olympics) in Chicago. He was proud to be one of the older people on stage. “I made a living on photography but I spread my interest between that and being a father and a husband,” he said. “I worked from home until 2002 and I was always around. I was a citizen and I’m still a citizen. My wife’s business was very successful and took up the slack from the ups and downs of a freelance career.”
The family’s storyline always seems to include clothing. Between 1979 and 2002 Margaret was owner of the popular Hand Me Downs in Evanston that sold pre-owned children’s clothing and toys. Her portrait is featured on the last page of “On the Line/Out To Dry.” She is sitting under a majestic tree in Cuba City, WI. reading a book. On the end page, Sundlof thanked his wife and his children for their support in his book project.
But then one final question would be, who does Sundlof’s laundry?
“My wife,” the storied photographer answered with a sunny smile.---Dave Hoekstra
