Black in the ’70s: Photographer Charles Caldwell’s ‘Back in the Day’ Images Revisited

Courtesy of Charles Caldwell

“Black in the ’70s: Photographer Charles Caldwell’s ‘back in the day’ images are revisited“

By Lee Bey

Published by: Chicago Public Media/WBEZ91.5

March 08, 2012

“Charles Caldwell doesn’t often shoot photos these days. The Hoffman Estates resident is happily married with grown children, has a full-time job at a cable television company and is active in his church. Indeed, it’s been decades since Caldwell routinely carried around a camera. ‘I guess after raising three kids and 32 years of marriage, I don’t have the same passion to get out and shoot as much,’ Caldwell said earlier this week.”

Courtesy of Charles Caldwell

“Before the kids, the job and the other adult stuff, Caldwell was a young shutterbug who shot hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of 35mm images between the early and late 1970s, beginning when he was a Harlan High School student. And though he doesn’t shoot much today, Caldwell, now in his mid-50s, held on to virtually all of his negatives. Scores and scores of them. Socked away for 30 years and more. Caldwell has begun pulling them out and taking a look.”

Courtesy of Charles Caldwell.

“The images show African American life as Caldwell, who is black, photographed what was around him. Folks in bell-bottoms. Dudes in big old Donny Hathaway apple hats–like the young gent on the left in the image above. When Caldwell became a student at predominantly-white Iowa State University in 1975, his focus didn’t change. He remembers shooting black life on campus, including visits by poet Nikki Giovanni and others. Caldwell is in the early stages scanning negatives and rediscovering his past–and ours.”

Courtesy of Charles Caldwell.

“Skilled unknown amateur photographers who quietly documented 20th century Chicago life–and whose work, a half-century later, is now being unearthed and shared thanks to the internet–have been a subject this blog has visited a few times. People like Charles Cushman, Vivian Maier and 1970s University of Chicago student Lou Fourcher, each walked the streets with a camera, taking poetic, high-quality images for their own entertainment. The work is important now because it adds to the photographic narrative of Chicago and maybe even reshapes it with additional stories, people, perspectives and locations. Caldwell’s images are another passage in that reformatting narrative.”

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