Christopher Kean loves images.
In more than 20 years as a professional photographer, he has captured images for national magazines and corporations. And throughout his travels, he has discovered many images that he believed deserved wider appreciation.
Those images, mostly from historical photos discovered in boxes, drawers or files of both famous and little-known museums, are displayed on the greeting cards Kean produces and distributes through his Park Ridge card company, The Nice Card Co.
On a recent day, seated in his comfortable office decorated by shelves of antique cameras and camera equipment, Kean pointed out a card that features a spectacular black-and-white photo of fireworks detonating over Buckingham Fountain. The photo, dating from 1950, “was basically in a drawer at the CTA,” Kean said.
The CTA’s collection of photos, taken over many years and largely unsorted and unused, is one of the major sources for Kean’s Chicago-oriented cards. Other photos come from the archives of the Chicago Historical Society. Still others come from scrapbooks of individuals.
“Most of these images are not well known,” Kean said, “but they are interesting.”
Currently, The Nice Card Co. has cards in 150 outlets in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, though it sells the most in the Chicago area, Kean said. Kean plans to go national with cards on New York and San Francisco themes and with a line that will feature photos from small towns and rural areas, “whether it’s paddle-wheel (steamboats) on the Mississippi or harvesting wheat in Kansas or picking cotton in the South,” he said.
Customers apparently find the images appealing. Frankie Andrae, owner of Original Expressions, a gift and card shop in Lincoln Park, was one of the first to begin carrying the card line nearly five years ago and still sells several dozen each month. “We’ve had a fantastic response, and people don’t tire of them,” Andrae said. “Most of our customers are regulars, and five years is a long time to carry anything in this store, but people just love them.”
She said one of the cards that sells year-round is a black-and-white of the Bears when they were playing at Wrigley Field. “That even sells out in the summer when there is no football,” she said.
According to Andrae, the appeal of the cards varies. “Part of the draw is the uniqueness,” she said. “The black-and-white does a cool thing, and there is nothing else like them. I’ve had people who come in and look for a photo that was taken the year people were born too.”
Kean agreed that the response “has been phenomenal. We’ve actually received fan mail from across the country from people who received the cards from friends in the Chicago area.”
Kean, who attended the School of the Art Institute before embarking on his photo career, chooses the photos himself. “My training has been as a fine artist, and I choose these images because they please my eye and my sensibilities,” he said. “Besides the aesthetic qualities, I think people also bring personal nostalgic responses to the images too.”
As an illustration, Kean points to a card of the Museum of Science and Industry that features a woman and young girl dressed in clothing from early in the century. “There are a lot of photos of the museum, but this is a particularly strong image of the building,” he said. “Also, someone might look at the card and say, `My grandmother had a dress like that,’ and choose the card because of that.”
Kean, 45, a resident of the Norwood Park neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest side, began the company in the early 1990s when the recession slowed the corporate and advertising jobs he was getting as a free-lance photographer. “The photo and advertising world had changed, and personal computers were grabbing a lot of commercial work,” he said. “I began retraining myself on computers and had time on my hands, and I realized I could probably create this company.”
Kean said the plan to create these kinds of cards was “basically a business management decision about using the resources we had. We chose to do what we knew we could do well, rather than creating calendars or an address book or a book of images.”
The company began with a firm ethic based on what Kean calls “old hippie idealism.” The cards are printed on recycled paper using soy-based inks and are packaged and distributed by a non-profit organization that provides work and job training for people with developmental disabilities. “When I realized I could do this with a local charity, I felt it would be a way to be philanthropic,” he said. “It’s worked out wonderfully.”
Bob Okazaki, executive director of Avenues to Independence, the Des Plaines-based agency for the disabled that works with The Nice Card Co., said the group’s work has been productive for both the company and the agency. “It provides the opportunity for people here to be productive, and it allows Chris to distribute his product,” Okazaki said.
Avenues to Independence employs approximately 200 people in sheltered workshops in Des Plaines, Park Ridge, Wheeling and Arlington Heights and on the Northwest Side of Chicago. The organization also contracts with other local companies for packaging or distribution work and prepares its clients to take jobs outside the sheltered environment.
The relationship with Kean and The Nice Card Co., Okazaki said, “was frankly just a business relationship to begin with. It’s evolved into a more personal one because Chris likes helping people with disabilities, and it’s a real benefit for them to be able to do productive work.”
The ability to help disabled workers fits in with another overall goal of the cards, Kean said. “We want to project life in a positive vein,” he said. “I avoid photos of war, pollution and anything that is judgmental or sarcastic. We aren’t really interested in that.”
In addition, Kean said, each card includes information on the back that describes not only the photo’s location and subject but also provides some historical background. “Even if people don’t buy the cards, they might learn something from them,” he said.
The success of the cards means that Kean must continue his hunt for newly discovered images, a hunt he frankly admits is more play than work. The search takes him to a variety of places. “I found wonderful images in a little Mennonite museum in Goshen, Ind., where the photos were all stored in shoe boxes,” he said. “The pictures are just delightful, but the people there didn’t know what to do with them or how to care for them. We were able to make contact sheets for them and show them how to preserve them.”
Kean said he negotiates separate agreements with each museum or archive for the rights to use the photos for a fee. “I feel very privileged to work with these people,” he said. “We meet with people and explain what we are doing and then in each case discuss the best way to proceed.”
Kean said that in addition to the use agreements, “we really like to give the people who help us some of the cards as a thank you.” In some cases, he said, museums have been able to sell the cards for their own fundraising, but “how they use them is really up to them.”
Presently, The Nice Card Co. employs Kean and two others full time in the office, and also has independent sales representatives, as well as those who do the distribution and packaging through Avenues to Independence. “When we publish new cards, we have a whole team of people–everyone from printers to packagers to sales people. What started out as a small hobby business has taken on a life of its own,” Kean said.
Kean repeatedly cites that hippie idealism as a driving force in the business. “I really enjoy what I’m doing,” he said. “I feel good about producing this rather than something destructive. I like to have a positive influence, even though it’s not big.”
In addition, Kean points out that many of the pictures on the cards depict lost landmarks or ways of life that have changed through the years. “By allowing people to look at these things and say, `What happened to these places?’ maybe people will think that we should have kept some of it and they’ll try to keep more in the future.”
