Kathy Richland was one of the Chicago Reader’s most humanistic photographers during its glory years. Richland shot for the alternative newspaper from 1975 until it was sold in 2007. She chronicled bar life, boxing matches, crossdressers, and naked women in steam baths. She was like the great New Yorker proletarian storyteller Joseph Mitchell with a camera. When I was coming of age in Chicago journalism, I wanted to work with Richland.
She was married to Reader staff writer Grant Pick who had similar empathetic views of the carnival that is Chicago. Pick died of a heart attack in February 2005 at their Lincoln Park home. He was 57.
“The first assignment I had for the Reader, I nailed,” Richland said in an April 2024 conversation at the Chicago home of fellow former Reader photographer Paul Natkin. “I didn’t know I was going to nail it.” She was at the writer’s tavern O’Rourke’s, then on North Avenue, west of Old Town. Customers shot darts in the back of the bar. Richland said, “I was able to get somebody behind the dartboard so the dartboard looked like his head. You never knew you were shooting for a (Reader) cover. It was only when you picked up the newspaper did you know you made the cover. It was 1975. So I started shooting for them all the time.”
Richland estimated she made more than 200 images for the Reader over the years. She lost track.
By choice.
“There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t regret this,” Richland said as her voice dropped into a whisper. “I had a pang when I walked into Paul’s office. When I sold my house 12 years ago it was harder than I expected. The last thing I had to deal with was the basement. I went from top to bottom. Grant’s office was first. My office was last. I was emotionally spent. And I threw away all my files. Not clippings. Negatives. At the last minute I pulled Reader jobs I thought I’d want. I went through all those years without thinking. I have room but I couldn’t cope. I threw out annual reports from Community Trust, Heartland Alliance—clients’ things. I did so much other stuff like that. We all did at the Reader. I didn’t care. But my copious files from the Readers all those years---I tossed most of them.”
Silence.
And then she continued, “Here’s one example. Around 2018 I went to this massage guy on Diversey. Real obscure. He said his dad used to run the candy shop with Frango Mints (on the 13th floor) at Marshall Field. He said there was an article in the Reader and his dad loved that. I said, ‘I photographed him.’ I don’t have those anymore.”
Richland did pull and scanned what she had for this Chicago Photo Collection project. She has negatives of the bare butts of three women at the Sunset Steam Baths in Rogers Park. The Reader used her picture in their annual photo calendar. “It was shot in December 1977 in an ice storm,” Richland recalled. “I’ll never forget that night. I was terrified of driving. I had a baby that was not even six months old.”
Every Tuesday night at Sunset Steam featured a sitz bath for women. The rest of the week was reserved for men. “Women’s night at the steam baths was the story,” Richland said. “Grant said, ‘Go! Go!’ The women are playing (the tile game) mahjong. And they are in sheets. I see the pool and see the women. They’re speaking Yugoslavian or something. I said, ‘If you’re not recognizable will you drop your sheets and do a racing dive off the side of the pool?’ They shriek and laugh. The three of them go over. I put my strobe (light) up and take two frames. My strobe blows because it was too steamy. Two of them were middle-aged and one was younger. Because you can see it in their butts.” Richland has a cheeky eye for detail.
Kathy Richland was born on September 17, 1948, in suburban Highland Park. Her father Arthur Richland did mergers and acquisitions at his own company downtown at 20 N. Wacker Dr. He died in 1991. Her mother Lucy lived in the family’s long-time Highland Park home until she died at age 87 in 2008. Lucy was a homemaker who in later years worked as a travel agent. Pick and Richland had two children: Emily who teaches children’s art in Chicago and John, who works in acting and media in Pasadena, CA.
Richland attended Highland Park High School and graduated from Boston University. She also earned a Master’s in Fine Arts at University of Illinois-Circle---at age 52.
After leaving Highland Park Richland wanted to be an art major focusing on graphic design. “I first went to University of Denver because I like to ski,” she said. “Then I transferred because I wanted a better art school. I thought Boston was the place to go,” she said. “Guess what? In 1968 it was the place to go. It was rockin’. Demonstrations. The university was closed down in 1970 and the next thing I knew I was back in Chicago and it was deader than dead. BU never had a graduation for the class of 1970.”
Richland was not interested in photography while growing up. Between her junior and senior year of college she even landed a job working at a graphic design studio at Michigan and Wacker. Then, for her senior year at Boston University she had to take Photo 101, a curriculum requirement. “One semester,” she said. “I had never held a camera. I had never developed a roll of film. It was basic. I learned what an enlarger was. They lent you Pentax cameras. And I was hooked. I would go to the library, read Modern Photography magazines.
I took that camera and photographed everywhere. Of course there were demonstrations all the time. I couldn’t stop taking pictures. After the semester was done I begged my way into taking another photo class.”
What hooked her?
“Images coming up, that I could make this happen,” she answered. “The physicality of it. The light and dark, understanding light. And the people! I could do portraits of people. I was mesmerized. I was also interested in the mechanics and I wasn’t a smart mathematical person. Using the camera and understanding the camera. Then my dad bought me a used Pentax and I was thrilled.”
Richland said mechanics go hand in hand with good photography. “Photographers are geeks,” she said. “What did I do when I walked in here? I wanted to see Paul’s gig and how he was set up. I’m still interested. I want to get the image, but I’m interested in the best
way to get it. Sometimes the equipment will help you do that. I’m a minimalist, just looking at Paul’s work and the lighting.”
She looked at a wall that featured Natkin’s popular black and white image of the Who’s Pete Townshend jumping high into the air while playing guitar at a May 1980 concert at the International Amphitheater in Chicago. “I’m trying to figure out where Paul was standing, his available light,” she said. “Clearly, he was hand holding. I pay attention to those things. He was close. He wasn’t shooting into the long lens, he was fairly wide. Technically I’m interested in how he did this.”
There were hardly any other women in the photography field when Richland began her career in 1970. She shared a two-bedroom apartment with two roommates on Chicago’s north side. She converted a closet into a darkroom. “I’d wash the prints in the tub,” Richland said. “I
was so pissed when they wanted to take a shower. We had one bathroom.”
Richland was working at the Chicago graphic design firm as she was exploring photography. “They fired me because they knew I’d be a better photographer than a graphic designer,” she said. “They helped me design a brochure to take pictures of people. I was good with
people; my sister, engagement photos and kids in the park. My mom was friends with a social worker in (Highland Park) District 108. We sent out a mailing. I started photographing children and families mostly in the north shore. Kathy Richland Photography. And it took off. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had two cameras and shot in black and white. It became word of mouth. I was good at it, but I was also learning how to be a photographer, shoot quickly, run around with kids outside climbing trees. I was printing and developing and building my business. I would also do layouts on the wall. I began mounting on Masonite, 8-by-10; 5-by-7 and do a layout. After all I was a graphic design person.”
Her life changed forever when she was fixed up with Pick in 1971. Sparks did not fly at the beginning. Richland lamented that their first dates were to see Fred Williamson’s Blaxploitation flick “Hell Up in Harlem” at the downtown Oriental Theater, the Ravinia music festival where they became volunteer ushers much to Richland’s surprise and a high school theater production that he was reviewing. But some 50 years later she smiled and reflected, “We were from similar worlds. He was from Glencoe. I knew about Grant. He knew me sort of. We had similar friends.”
Pick and Richland were married in 1974. In 1975 Pick had a concert he wanted her to photograph. “And there was (Reader photographer) Marc PoKempner photographing,” she said. “There I was with my clunky Canon F-1 (that weighs about 1.75 pounds). Clunk clunk. And there’s Mark with his Leica. I’m watching him. After the concert we’re in the back and Grant’s writing his story for the Chicago Lung Association. They sponsored the concert. I don’t remember anything about the concert, but Marc came over and said, ‘Your camera is making a lot of noise. You’re disruptive.’ And he walks away. I was mortified. And he was right. I had spent five years doing children, families, North Shore. I was done with it. I wanted to do editorial. I knew who Marc was. So I said, ‘I want to work for the Reader, I want to shoot people’,” Richland asked her new husband to support her while she transitioned to alternative newspapers. “I was making a lot of money and I was doing great,” she said. “I didn’t know if I was going to make it.” And Pick said to go for it.
Richland’s first pitch was to the now-defunct Midwest magazine insert of the Chicago Sun-Times. The magazine editor was Dick Takecuhi, the laid-back, cigar-smoking newspaperman who also mentored Roger Ebert. Takecuhi liked Richmond’s work and gave her a ‘Year of the Biennial’ (1976) spec job to document the events in downstate Mount Vernon, Il. “So I drove to Mount Vernon, which is practically in Kentucky,” she said. “I was being a big girl now. I had to find people for portraits and stories, which I did. I came back and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll run it.’ And that was my first editorial job.
“When I can look back fifty years at this young person that I was, I didn’t have any confidence.”
Chicago’s strong sense of community helped Richland gain confidence. “The guys at Standard Photo, the guys at Helix, where you rent, they couldn’t have been nicer to me,” she said. “Paul Natkin helped me. My colleagues helped me. They told me how to shoot jobs. I could get work. I didn’t know how to do it. But we were competitive. We were going for the same work. I was the only woman at the Reader. All of a sudden I was eight months pregnant doing Latino boxing night. The Reader editors were great to me. They didn’t differentiate. They gave me tough assignments. I was in the Robert Taylor Homes. They didn’t look at me any differently than any other photographers. I really appreciate that.”
The memories of Richland hitting the Reader Tuesday night deadline are strong and real. “You would get your assignment maybe Saturday or Sunday but usually Monday morning,” she said. “You’d have to arrange it, go shoot, develop and print. You had all day Tuesday. It was tight. I’d dry my prints in the car or put them on a print dryer and pray they go quick. Editors were up all (Tuesday) night. They had bags and bags of junk food. I’d run up to the third floor (on Grand Avenue in River North).
Richland also remembered a 1986 story that Pick was assigned to write for People magazine. An 11-year-old boy was raising his pig for the Berrien County Youth 4-H Fair in Michigan. A week after Pick’s interview with the boy and his family, Richland drove to Michigan to
photograph the lad with his pig. “Grant intentionally chose to omit mentioning the overwhelming odor of the barns, knowing I’d faint, or worse, not go,” she said. “It was February and the pig barns had been closed up. The stench was shocking. My gear, umbrellas, power cords, all absorbed the smell. Back in Chicago a couple of days later I
was taking a group shot of law partners. I opened my gearbox when the odor of the pig barn filled the space. Unfortunately, I needed those umbrellas to take the shot. I did get expression when sharing the story with the group.” After that shoot, Richland ditched the umbrellas and power cords for good.
The Pick-Richland collaboration lives on in “The People Are the News: Grant Pick’s Chicago Stories” (Northwestern University Press, 2008), a compilation of Pick’s best Reader stories including the urban outreach worker “Brother Bill” in which he collaborated with
photographer Lloyd DeGrane. In the book’s foreword, Alex Kotlowitz wrote that Pick did not have an “oversized personality” like some of his journalistic predecessors. “He ambled around in the background, listening to and watching all that unfolded before him. He had the keen eyes and ears of a novelist....”
Richland said, “Grant never published a book. He had many ideas. He was going to do a book on (the television puppet show) Kukla, Fran and Ollie. He wrote to publishers. He went to his colleague’s book signings. He always regretted not having been published. And then he died suddenly. So after Grant died our son John went through his Reader articles. He was helped by (Chicago journalist) Rob Warden. Rob put him in contact with Northwestern University Press. Grant was respectful of those who were ignored. I shot the black and white
cover. It was of a couple small-time evangelists that Grant found at 6128 S. Kilpatrick who wouldn’t pay rent for 4 1/2 years. Then they sued the landlord. The case involved five lawyers and three judges.”
The move from black-and-white Reader work to color photography was fast and challenging for Richland. “In the early 1990s magazines went to color overnight,” she said. “I was shooting for People and assorted Midwest magazines. It wasn’t fun. Color meant serious light. There’s very little margin of error in color. With black and white we had darkrooms and could do some manipulation. When I shot for the Reader, I wanted the finest grain. Having the black border around the rim of a print was important.” The border denoted that the photo was shot full frame and not cropped down.
Richland explained, “ Your framing is your shooting. For me, color was hard physically and technically. You needed two umbrellas and a power source. Carrying that in addition to your gear and getting on a plane was hard. That meant an assistant which was a killer for me. The guys could do it but I had a hard time.”
Richland obtained her MFA in 2003. Her UIC advisor was artist Kerry James Marshall. Her thesis morphed out of a Reader cover story on middle-aged crossdressers she did with Pick. “These two guys would get together on Wednesday, dress up, and go shopping,” Richland
recalled. “One of them-- Katy-- was usually Mike six days a week. But one day a week his wife let him be Katy. So I went to (suburban) Bensenville, nice house, and photographed Katy and Robin putting on nail polish and makeup in the mirror. I’ve got all those photos. They’re special. I thought to myself, ‘Ooh, this is kinky.’ So I talked to Katy who was the connector to the community.”
Richland wanted to go further in her documentation of the private community. Katy was more than willing to open doors. Overall Richland photographed 40 to 50 people in various get-togethers. “One worked in accounting at Northwestern hospital, Joe would dress up as Abigal and so on,” she said. “They might have a psychologist at a meeting talking about how their partners handle the transition. They could gather to be who they needed to be. Amazing portraits.” Her collection was featured as part of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.
Truthful portraits cannot be made without building trust.
“People need to talk to you,” Richland explained. “These people wanted good photos. The internet was just starting and they were just taking selfies in hotel mirrors. Along I come and I’ll take a nice portrait of you. We’ll do this together. You sign a release and this is what we’re doing. It’s all understandable.”
That’s what makes the magic of Kathy Richland click. She understands all that is around her. ----Dave Hoekstra
