A collection drawn from five decades of the photographer's work celebrates animals with humans in natural and domestic settings, from the image of a man passing a peanut to a monkey to a pig drinking a can of beer, in a volume that also seeks to reveal the animal within human beings.

Animals

Arts & Photography

Shay, Art

Photography & Video

University of Illinois Press

In the 120 photographs in Couples, Shay shows us couples in love - walking, talking, kissing, embracing, dining, arguing - as well as many other pairings, human and non-human, whose relationship he has skillfully crystallized in a single instant of interaction. Inanimate air vents and grain silos, as well as parents and children, siblings, friends, neighbors, famous actors and athletes, unknown passersby, dogs, and livestock. All these rub shoulders - so to speak - in the pages of Couples, sought out by Shay's keen eye and coupled forever by his impertinent camera.

Couples: PHOTOGRAPHS

Individual Artists

In forty-five years as one of America's liveliest photographers for Life, Time, and other assignments, Art Shay has established a world-wide reputation for capturing the oddities of the moment. His photographs of Khrushchev, Liberace, Harry Truman, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Nelson Algren, George Solti, and hundreds of other luminaries are not the usual portraits; they are people off-guard, memorable for their humanity rather than their celebrity. But, unlike other great photographers of his time, Art Shay has a way with words. His prose is sharp, vivid, and evocative, the product of a well-nurtured mind and a cultivated intellect. In Album for an Age he puts both his words and his pictures to work, and the result is a delightful, entertaining, thoughtful, and sometimes wacky sightseeing tour of many of the major personalities and events of the last fifty years. "Daumier," Mr. Shay writes, "taught me to aim my predatory camera at the contumely, at snobbery, pretensions, cruelty, and the machinery of petty power." Some of it, though, he can't help liking; all of it he writes about with wit and insight. Here is a marvelously unconventional book by an unconventional photographer—not a picture book but a book with pictures.

Album for an Age: Unconventional Words and Pictures From the Twentieth Century

Ivan R. Dee, Publisher

Like Shaking Hands with God details a collaborative journey on the art of writing undertaken by two distinguished writers separated by age, race, upbringing, and education, but sharing common goals and aspirations. Rarely have two writers spoken so candidly about the intersection where the lives they live meet the art they practice. That these two writers happen to be Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer makes this a historic and joyous occasion. The setting was a bookstore in New York City, the date Thursday, October 1, 1998. Before a crowd of several hundred, Vonnegut and Stringer took up the challenge of writing books that would make a difference and the concomitant challenge of living from day to day. As Vonnegut said afterward, "It was a magical evening." A book for anyone interested in why the simple act of writing things down can be more important than the amount of memory in our computers.

Like Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation about Writing

Literature & Fiction

Stringer, Lee

Klaven (moderator), Ross

Vonnegut, Kurt.

United States

Seven Stories Press

They met in 1949 when Art was a reporter for Life. Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn’t pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay’s camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren’s poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools. Chicago’s Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos—many recently discovered and published here for the first time—of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you’ll see Shay’s pictures; look at Shay’s photos and you’ll hear Nelson’s words.

Chicago's Nelson Algren

My Florence is a collection of striking moments drawn from the shared life of renowned Chicago photojournalist ART SHAY and his beloved wife, Florence. By turns casual and glamorous, pensive and humorous, the photographs start the day Art and Florence met in 1942, as 20-year-old camp counselors in the Catskill Mountains, and continue for seven decades. Former LIFE, Fortune, Time, and Sports Illustrator photographer, ART SHAY is famous for immortalizing some of America's most compelling 20th century figures, including John F. Kennedy Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But the story of Florence was Shay's constant beat. The result is a story that runs deep and reads as a call to joy and source of inspiration for lovers, family, friends, and the photographer in us all.

My Florence: A 70-Year Love Story

Parenting & Relationships

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