Chicago photographer Bob Natkin died in 1996, and for years his pictures sat in boxes in the basement of his West Rogers Park home, where his widow, Judy Lewis Natkin, still lives. Then last year his son Paul, a prominent local music photographer, and the staff of the Stephen Daiter Gallery began sorting through them to put together the first exhibit ever devoted to Natkin’s work, which opens at the gallery this Friday.
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“This man had no business giving up photography,” says Paul Berlanga, director of the Daiter Gallery. “We went into that basement and we saw image after image, year after year of solid, solid work.” Berlanga first become interested in Natkin’s work several years ago, when he saw some of his photos in a magazine retrospective. A mutual friend put him in touch with Paul, who’d wanted to exhibit his father’s work for years.
One reason for Natkin’s unassuming attitude was that he began photographing as a hobby and was mostly self-taught. He was born in Chicago in 1919, grew up in Albany Park, and started taking nature photographs while working as a camp counselor in Wisconsin. He was drafted into the army in 1941 and assigned to the medical corps–he’d been a premed student at the University of Illinois. But an officer saw him using his camera in his spare time and made him an air force photographer. He flew with bomber squadrons, taking pictures so that officers could determine whether targets had been hit. “He was in the last plane in each formation, and by the time his plane flew over whoever was alive on the ground had their guns zeroed in on him,” says Paul. “He was in the bottom of the plane. His plane got shot up a lot.” But he got hit only once–on the 49th of his 50 missions.
There’s an unguarded intimacy in Natkin’s photos, even when they’re taken from a distance–a Mexican woman stripped to the waist and bathing in a stream, a little boy standing in a squalid slum stairwell, a woman staring out through the bars of a jail cell, a bored conventioneer. “They’ve got soul,” says Paul Natkin. “It’s all about connecting with the subject. He actually stopped and talked to people. He didn’t just run up and take a picture and leave. He cared about building a relationship before he photographed them.”
Bob Natkin: Photographer
