Stephen Deutch’s photography career spanned more than four decades in Chicago as he labored with little fanfare, moving easily among commercial work, journalism and art. And no matter what he was doing, he always remained true to his sculptor’s eye.
Deutch came to Chicago from Paris in 1936, with five years as a successful commercial photographer already under his belt. He was 28 years old and had found his distinctive style-a sculptural style in that the lighting and depth of field captured a three-dimensional perspective. And this was the instinct he always followed, whether photographing products in the studio for an advertising account or documenting men in a Clark Street pool hall or mothers and babies at the Infant Welfare Society.
His Chicago career, however, did not begin propitiously. When he showed his portfolio to art directors at all the large advertising agencies, he got a universal brushoff because even though they admired his work, they realized their clients probably would balk at such daring lighting effects in an era when most commercial photography was flat and neutral. Deutch and his wife, Helene, had invested more than $2,000 to open and equip a studio, and with no commercial business, life was precarious for a while.
Deutch retreated momentarily until he saw the monthly magazine Coronet, which was based in Chicago, and realized his photographs would be a perfect fit. He showed some samples of his work-Paris scenes, dramatic situations, nudes-to Coronet’s art director. Quickly he was being published monthly in Coronet and getting lots of commercial accounts. “It was almost miraculous,” says Deutch, still marveling some 50 years later.
Deutch did fashion photography for clients such as Marshall Field’s and Carson Pirie Scott. He specialized in dramatic advertising vignettes for Abbott Laboratories, the First National Bank of Chicago and U.S Gypsum among others.
He free-lanced for countless magazines, including Ebony, for which he did photo essays on Lena Horne, Duke Ellington and Joe Louis.
In his spare time, he volunteered his services to various political, social-service and artistic organizations, shooting poignant documentary work.
A favorite assignment was undertaken for the Chicago Board of Education’s annual report. It took him to every elementary and high school in the city, plus special-school facilities for the handicapped and inmates of the Cook County Jail. “I got to know Chicago better than 99 percent of Chicagoans,” Deutch says. “I returned to those neighborhoods to photograph in the years that followed.
“I had no goal, no aim, and I didn’t know any of the master photographers of that time, like Walker Evans and Robert Frank. When the first art museum curator I encountered told me my work reminded him of Evans and Frank, I was flattered-except I didn’t know who they were.
“My nature is that I’m a loner. I thought always that whatever I do, whether in sculpture or photography, it comes from within, rather than by influences, although I’m fully aware of the fact I was influenced subconsciously. I may have seen pictures by Evans and Frank and liked them. To that degree they did influence me, but not knowingly.”
Deutch says that one person helped him discover his aim in photography, which he says was to show the “conditions of life.” That was the late Chicago novelist Nelson Algren, the tough, compassionate, complicated champion of the exploited lower classes. They met when Deutch took photographs of Algren for book jackets and publicity, and the two became dear friends. “He came to the studio, and we talked,” Deutch remembers. “I made a lot of photos, and he was crazy about them. He thought he looked beautiful, more beautiful than he ever thought he would look.
“I photographed Nelson from time to time for 20 years. (Chicago photographer) Art Shay preceded me as Nelson’s confidant. He dropped Art without explanation. I became his court photographer. I respected him and loved him truly. We took many walks together, just aimlessly walking around, going into a bar to study the people and try to understand what makes them tick or what makes them not tick. And you know his work-it’s all dealing with that sort of problem.”
Deutch says he did most of his most memorable photography projects between 1960 and 1965. He had divorced his longtime wife, Helene, in 1960 and remarried. Unhappy in the second marriage and guilty about walking out on Helene and his three daughters, he plunged into photography. He photographed three compelling documentary series, “Bench Sitters”; “Doors and Windows,” which explored people and environments; and “Twilight World,” which exposed the plight of patients in state mental health facilities and was published in the Chicago Daily News and submitted by the newspaper for a Pulitzer Prize.
During the same period, he began sculpting in wood again and never stopped. In 1965 he remarried Helene, the one who had introduced him to photography in Paris.
Deutch grew up in Budapest, the youngest of three sons of a working-class family, At 15 he apprenticed to a wood carver for the chance to learn how to carve furniture. He attended art school for one year and began making his own sculpture. In 1927, when he was 19, he went off to Paris. He took a tiny room in an inexpensive hotel and worked as a furniture maker while sculpting in his spare time and exhibiting his work in avant-garde shows.
When he lost his job in an economic depression, Deutch was forced to take a job as a salesman for a food exporter-importer whose product line included a snack called “Pretz Sticks.” This job took him all over France as well as to Holland, Belgium, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Through a friend, he met Helene Beck, a lively young photographer, originally from Transylvania, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, who was working for Deberney & Peignot, a Parisian commercial printing firm that had a prestigious photo studio equipped with all the latest gear. The couple married in 1931, and soon after, Deberney & Peignot went out of business. Their clients promised Helene their continued business if she would open a studio elsewhere. Helene agreed and bought equipment from her former employers for almost nothing. Stephen quit his traveling-salesman job to work in the studio they opened in the Montparnasse section of Paris.
“My wife first told me about the principles of printing photographs, and I began to understand what can be done in the darkroom,” says Deutch, a gentle, modest man of 85 years. “I took my background in sculpture with me into photography-the feeling of three dimensions, dramatic lighting, strong shadows and highlights.
“I always saw three dimensions in every model who came to the studio, and I was good at lighting and was able to handle people-pose them, demonstrate facial animation and gestures and so on.”
And later when he roamed Chicago’s neighborhoods, Deutch was also seeking to document a common humanity. “I hope this doesn’t sound too pretentious, but I like to think the bulk of my editorial or artistic photography deals with the human condition,” he says. “I know that’s big words. You think about Malraux and Camus using those words, but that’s the way I feel about it. There’s a certain condition that people all over the world live.”
Deutch gave up commercial photography 10 years ago. Even though he still had a profitable business, he could see the writing on the wall. Rather than be judged a little tame by the pitiless standards of a younger generation of art directors, Deutch stopped and threw himself into sculpting “full speed.” He now divides his time between Chicago and a home on the Dunes in Michigan, where he keeps his sculpture studio.
Some 13,000 of Deutch’s photographic prints, transparencies and negatives dating back to 1932 now are held in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society, where they will be available to show future generations how Chicago was-and how human nature in all its heartbreak and humor never changes.
