This is a story in snapshots.
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It was raining, or it seems appropriate to imagine that it was raining, on the day that a little boy, no older than 8 and barely tall enough to drink by himself from a water fountain, found his future on a bench in Lake Shore Park, hard by Lake Michigan at Chicago Avenue. n “I didn’t even know what it was. It was just this black box,” he says. “My father would take my sister and me to this park every day and I took the black box to the people in the field house. A couple of weeks later, when no one had claimed it, they said I could have it. I was working at the Tanke drugstore at the corner of Clark and Schiller Streets and that is where I brought it.” n And that is where this conversation took place: “What is this and how does it work?” said the little boy. “It is a camera and here is some film,” said Mr. Tanke, who owned the store. n The little boy has long been a man and he is remembering this — so much of life at 79 years old is about trying to grab and hold memories — while standing in the delightful and serene space surrounding the Water Tower. n He is posing for photos, a strange and not altogether comfortable reversal of roles for him. His life has been spent behind a camera. Astonishingly, because he has had no formal training, he is generally regarded as the greatest photographer in the history of Chicago. Or, as Tony Jones, former president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, puts it, “His work is startling in its breadth and inventiveness, continuing to evolve and amaze us.”His name is Victor Skrebneski.
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If you do not know his name, you have surely seen his work.
It hangs on the walls of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has had dozens of gallery and museum exhibitions.
His photos have appeared in thousands of magazines, including, for many years, this one. For decades he shot advertising campaigns for Estee Lauder and continues to do so for Ralph Lauren.
His photos taken for the posters of the Chicago International Film Festival since its inception 45 years ago are a sexy, yearly sensation. He has shot hundreds of movie stars, thousands of fashion models and is the photographer of choice for the city’s business and social elite, those willing and able to pay the many thousands of dollars it costs to have him take their picture.
In 2000, Steppenwolf asked him to shoot its 33 ensemble members for a book commemorating the theater’s 25th anniversary. Artistic director Martha Lavey says, “I love Victor.”
Everybody says that.
“I love Victor, and I remember when I was the executive producer of ‘Siskel & Ebert’ and we wanted new publicity photos and went to the best,” says Donna LaPietra, the vice president and executive producer for [Bill] Kurtis Productions, the longtime companion of said Kurtis and a fixture on the local society-charity scene. “It was vintage Victor. Ready to go at 8:30 a.m. he’d already been thinking, obviously, and knew what he wanted to do before we got there. He wanted the guys closer together than they were ever used to being, literally standing with their arms touching for two hours. The notion was for them to go fist to fist, with one thumb up and one down. Never have two thumbs worked so hard.
“As always, Victor maintained a smile, his throaty laugh, but his eyes really never leave the subject, and his mind always seems to be processing: moving the guys ever so slightly, calling for hair spray. . . he can see one hair that isn’t where it’s supposed to be.
“When he shot Bill [Kurtis] it was maybe the only time Victor ever asked someone to leave their clothes on! Even the overcoat. He had him turn up the collar and within 15 minutes he had his shot . . . dramatic lighting chiseled the face.”
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Many years ago, I was, for a time, trying to help a famous local X-rated film star write her memoirs. We met every Friday morning for a few hours during which I would turn on a tape recorder and debrief her about her life. It was an interesting and enlightening experience but one that never did wind up published. On one of those Fridays I showed up at her door — the building’s doorman had become familiar with my face but remained curious about the purpose of my weekly visits — and was greeted by a yet-to-be-famous foreign male action film star (not X-rated) who had obviously spent the night. After a couple of awkward moments he invited me in.
“She is sleeping for a while,” he said. “Come in. I will make coffee.”
And he did, after fetching himself a robe.
We sat down in the living room.
“I love this city. Are you from here?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “What do you want to know about Chicago?”
“Only one thing. Tell me about this Victor Skrebneski. He took my picture yesterday and then we talked at a party later,” he said. “He fascinates me.”
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Skrebneski’s parents were Russian-Polish immigrants and the first home they had (Victor was still an infant) was on Milwaukee Avenue. “My mother did not like it there,” he says. “She said, ‘If we are in America, we should live in America. Here it feels like we are still back in Poland.’ And so we moved.”
And moved and moved and moved. For a time the family lived in a house at Grand Avenue and Rush Street and then, Skrebneski says, “we moved from place to place every few years.” He describes his father, Joseph, who worked for International Harvester, as “gentle and kind.” His mother, Anna, who did not work, he characterizes as “excitable.”
“Every Sunday she would take me downtown to the movies,” he says. “It was always a sad movie where she would cry. And after the movie we would be met outside by a man named John and he would take us to lunch and . . . I don’t know if she was fooling around.”
He pauses and then says, “Why am I telling you all this?”
He does not much like to talk about himself but will happily tell you that his first photos, taken with that Kodak bellows-style camera he found in the rain, were of his older sister, Jennie, and that they are the favorite photos he has ever taken.
“She was so beautiful and I am still sorry thinking about all the hot lights I put on her, how I made her put up with all of that,” he says.
He attended Catholic grammar schools and, by the time he was a student at Waller (now Lincoln Park) High School, was asking classmates to pose for him. “But the only art we had at school was dance, jitterbugging at the corner store that had a jukebox and a small dance floor,” he says.
His interest in art was sparked and fueled by a woman named Dorothea Bates, a family friend who lived in the coach house behind the Skrebneskis’ various family homes.
“Whenever we moved, my mother always insisted that there be a coach house where Dorothea could live,” says Skrebneski. “She was an artist and actor and sculptor. She was with the WPA and she was so patient in explaining to me everything she did.”
He enrolled at the School of the Art Institute and later attended The Institute of Design, the famous school founded in 1937 by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian painter/photographer and former professor at the influential Bauhaus in Germany. There he studied painting and sculpture.
“One of the great mysteries to me is why I never studied photography,” he says. “I would take photos all the time and when I would get them back from the drugstore, I would crop them [remove elements of an image to stress one part] and mount them on pieces of cardboard.”
He showed this work to an instructor at the school, Harry Callahan, one of the great innovators of modern American photography.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Callahan. “You should go to New York.”
That was what he did. He so quickly started getting jobs for such magazines as Esquire that he came back here to pack up his belongings, intending to move permanently to New York. But he got a job shooting an ad for Marshall Field and Company. Then another and another.
In 1952, he opened his home/studio on LaSalle Street, directly across from one of the buildings in which he had lived with his family. It is gone now, replaced by Sandburg Village. He is still here.
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He has discovered some of the most famous fashion models of the 20th Century. A few of the names are now washed of fame: Wilhelmina, Toni Lacey, Beth Hyatt, Karen Harris.
But there was also Cindy Crawford, who grew up in DeKalb and one day, when she was a teenager, walked into Skrebneski’s studio. Jovanna Papadakis, who was for more than four decades until her death in September the studio’s gatekeeper, took one look at her and told Skrebneski, “Victor, you have to see this girl. She’s going to be a star.”
They began working together.
“Victor taught me everything I know about modeling,” Crawford has said many times. “I love Victor.”
Asked many years ago to assess his mark on fashion photography, he said: “All the models look like beautiful ladies. It has never changed from that. In fashion, you concentrate on the face to make sure the girl is beautiful. In portrait photography, you concentrate on the face to get the character of the face. One, you’re selling. One you’re not.”
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The list of the famous people who have passed through his studio, through his life, is long enough to fill another magazine. But he is not a name dropper and is the model of discretion. (He would not offer one detail from a photo shoot with Sam Zell, chairman and CEO of the Tribune Company, which owns this newspaper, and his wife, Helen, though he does say they are “good friends.”)
He will tell you about, but not very much about, the three or four days he spent at Andy Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan. He will let slip that he vacationed with David Bowie and his wife, the model Iman. He has ridden on the back of a motorcycle driven by Dennis Hopper. He speaks fondly of the many days and nights he spent with Bette Davis.
“Orson Welles was an hour and a half late for his photo shoot,” says Skrebneski. “When he finally arrived, he took a look around the studio, at where I had placed the lights. I was a bit anxious. He was, of course, one of the great masters of lighting [see ‘Citizen Kane’].”
After a couple of minutes, Welles turned to Skrebneski and said, “All right, maestro. Let’s begin.”
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“I don’t idolize celebrities. I am not impressed by celebrities or stars. They interest me as faces,” Skrebneski says, though he is ever respectful (still referring to Welles as “Mr. Welles”). “There is an intimacy that has to be formed between me and whoever I am shooting. That is why I like to be in a studio only with the star and my assistant. I do not like agents and others to be around.”
In some circles you can hear debate about which is his most famous or influential photo.
There are those who argue that it is the shot of Welles or one of the others — Davis, Truman Capote, Warhol, Liza Minnelli and John Huston, among them — in what has become known as the “black turtleneck” series, which began in the 1970s. He had his subjects wear an oversized black cashmere turtleneck sweater and posed them against a gray background in an attempt — very successful, to gauge by the critics — to reveal “the inner essence of his subjects.”
Some will point to his Chicago International Film Festival work.
My money is on Vanessa Redgrave, shot in Hollywood in 1967 and which — defying the image that one might have of the staid and conservative paper the Chicago Tribune was — first appeared that year in the pages of this magazine and does so again, its impact undiminished by the decades, on page 11.
Others prefer his Hopper, though not initially the actor himself when Skrebneski sent him a print. “Terrible, terrible, terrible,” said Hopper. “I really, really hate this. Makes me look like the devil.”
That was 25 years ago. A couple of years ago, a TV documentary was made about Hopper’s life and the photo was a prominent part of it. Hopper called Skrebneski and said, “You know, I really love that photo.”
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There would appear to be few similarities between Skrebneski and Art Shay beyond the fact that they are both photographers. Shay has spent his career as a photojournalist, with hundreds of magazine covers to his credit. He has also written dozens of books. But they walked different streets. When Skrebneski was hanging out with sleek fashion models and movie stars, Shay was in the company of Nelson Algren and drug addicts. He is gritty to Skrebneski’s glamorous and one might expect him to regard Skrebneski’s work with the same disdain a prizefighter might show a concert violinist.
Surprise!
“Whatever other age we’re in, thanks to the burgeoning of the graphic arts, we are in the Age of Style,” says Shay. “For years, Skrebneski’s purview of Estee Lauder models more or less involuntarily formed the consciousness of American fashion, and fashions across the world. The photojournalism that Life magazine pioneered — that look of something captured while it was actually happening — was built upon by Skrebneski. In picture after picture he has added a dimension of candidness, by artful posing, lighting and studio mastery. His nudes are nakeder than naked. His subjects appear to be moving on a flat page.
“Skrebneski’s mastery of the human body, especially in tandem with others (male-to-male, especially), advance the painterly art of centuries gone by with his loving caresses of light and lens. Hunting the same forests as [photographer Robert] Mapplethorpe, Skrebneski brings down more interesting game. If he flirts with pornography, it’s in your mind, not his. Your purview tends to complete his pictures, a real test of art.”
Adds Shay: “Photojournalists such as I, a few years older than Skrebneski, stand in awe and considerable jealousy of him. Some photographers aspire to work toward the cutting edge. Skrebneski is the cutting edge of photography in our time.”
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“I feel as if I have known Victor forever,” says Lois Weisberg, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs. “His contributions are forever woven into the fabric of the city. He is one of Chicago’s most enduring icons. For me personally, he has been a true friend. He is a force to be reckoned with and, truth be told, he usually wins.”
A few weeks ago, Skrebneski was out having dinner and bumped into the mayor, who asked him, “How’s it going with the park?”
The park he was talking about is Mariano Park, that tiny triangular space formed by the meeting of Rush and State Streets. Skrebneski wants, and has the mayor’s okay, to decorate it, perhaps adorning it with lights. This would be less ambitious than the complete remodeling of the park around the Water Tower that he accomplished in 2000, a $600,000 project to which he contributed some of his own money. Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin praised the Water Tower park’s “quietly elegant landscape. . . . Give Skrebneski four stars for the heroic effort.”
The photographer’s interest in this project is ongoing, a reflection not only of his love for the park, where his father took him and his sister almost every day when they were growing up, but his passion for Chicago’s architecture and public spaces.
And so, there he was one October morning, lamenting the death of two trees and discussing other matters with Bob Cannatello who, as the Chicago Avenue Pumping Station chief operating engineer, has worked closely with him on the park.
“He cares about this place,” says Cannatello, his Bridgeport roots (he still lives there) on display in his accent. “He’s as Chicago as I am and he pays a lot of attention to what’s going on here. Hey, but did Vic tell you about the time we stayed out till 5 in the morning at this bar? That was a blast and Vic hung tough the whole night. He’s the best.”
He means that in best sort of Chicago-neighborhood-stand-up-guy kind of way, having nothing at all to do with anything else about Skrebneski.
“I have spent most of my life living in an area between North Avenue and the river,” Skrebneski says. “I believe that staying here gave me a certain freedom of expression in my work that might not have been possible in New York. But I also love Chicago deeply.”
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Sandro Miller is a young Chicago photographer who works very much in the Skrebneski commercial/portrait vein.
“I first became aware of Skrebneski at the beginning of my career in 1976,” he says. “I was 18 and he was one of my Fab Four, along with Francesco Scavullo, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, all creating imagery iconic beyond all others. I still remember seeing for the first time the haunting portraits of Bette Davis, the powerful and chilling portrait of Orson Welles, supermodel Iman holding what looks like a decapitated head of her lover David Bowie, dark and rich with deep shadows. Victor’s work spoke deeply into my creative soul and I will carry these unforgettable images in my head forever. His influence on my career would become very evident in my work in years to come: the use of light and shadow to tell the stories ofsubjects.
“I first met Victor in 1989. I was like a little kid about to meet one of my childhood baseball heroes.He was kind and supportive, encouraging me and wishing me success.
“Victor entered the world of photography as a special man during a special time in photographic history.The golden age of photography and advertising campaigns were alive and being produced with huge budgets.Victor had the talent, charm and connections to rise to the top of this glamorous career.And he did this here. Chicago has not always been kind to its artists and commercial photographers. It takes a certain talent to make it big here and Victor has paved the path for us, not only with his talent but with his heart.”
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Others talk and write at length about Skrebneski.
Tribune art critic Alan Artner has called him the “king of froufrou” and wrote of a 1999 exhibition that Skrebneski’s work represents a “fundamentally silly treatment of the ‘high life’ that confuses taste with money and glamor with meaningful power.” Later, reviewing an exhibition of photos of athletes competing in Gay Games VII in Chicago in 2006, Artner wrote that “the pictures look strong, without affectation and pleasingly direct.”
While Skrebneski does admit to “analyzing my work every day,” he also says, “I really do think of myself as a working photographer, not an artist.”
His latest project is contained in a handsome book, “Richard’s Bar,” a gathering of photos taken in a Grand Avenue tavern. This is his 14th book and his first foray into photojournalism.
To the untrained eye, it might appear as if he had one too many glasses of champagne, which is his favorite drink. “That has been my style for a long time, blur and movement,” he says. “I have been taking out-of-focus photos my whole life. I love the way it looks.
“I just try to keep my shoots simple. I have always been influenced by art and by film but I don’t ever want to start to think too much about that. I fight the complexity of it all. I’m not big on technique. I try to design a picture in my head and that’s it. I take it. Photography was something I just fell into. I decided I wanted to do it for the rest of my life because I liked it.”
During a recent trip to New York, Sandro Miller visited the renowned photo gallery StanleyWise, where he hada conversation with its co-owner, Takouhy Wise.They talked at length about “the greatness of Victor’s career,” says Miller. “About his longevity, his continuing vibrancy.”
The gallery owner asked, “Who will carry the torch when Victor retires? Who will fill his shoes?”
“Retirement?” Sandro said. “That will not happen. He will shoot until his last glorious breath.”
At the studio on LaSalle Street, Skrebneski has a favorite word.
That word is “Next!”
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