Jack Jaffe, 82, Photographer documented Chicago, fostered photography
Hoodoo
South Shore native created museum exhibit 'Changing Chicago' and the
Focus-Infinity Fund with money from Car-X auto repair business
By Trevor Jensen, Tribune reporter
4:52 p.m. CDT, July 25, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/obituaries/ct-met-jaffe-obit-20100725,0,4124238.story
Jack Jaffe built a successful career in the car repair business while
pursuing his interest in photography.
Through the years, Mr. Jaffe's camera recorded the civil rights
movement, Maxwell Street musicians and Montana's big skies. He exhibited
widely and has photographs in the collection of the Art Institute of
Chicago.
After he sold his Car-X muffler and repair business in the mid-1980s, he
devoted his full attention to photography. With proceeds from the sale,
he started a foundation that supported the medium and produced a major
photographic documentary about life in the city called "Changing Chicago."
Mr. Jaffe, 82, died of lymphoma Thursday, July 22, in his Chicago home,
said Burton Rissman, a longtime friend.
Mr. Jaffe's biography at jjaffe.com begins, "From 1955 to 1984, I was a
businessman."
His brother-in-law, Gordon Sherman, created the Midas muffler shop
chain, and Mr. Jaffe joined the company a few years after graduating
from college. The business blossomed, but Sherman had a proxy fight with
his father over control of Midas around 1970.
Mr. Jaffe, who had sided with his brother-in-law, then started Car-X
Service Systems, which like Midas franchised muffler and auto repair
shops. He sold the business to Tenneco in 1984, financially secure and
able to devote full attention to photography.
He was socially progressive throughout his life, and his interest in
photography took hold in the early 1960s. In his biography, he wrote, "I
was intrigued by the idea that an art form could also make social comment."
Inspired by the photographers who documented life in America like Walker
Evans and Dorothea Lang, he took a journalistic approach and shot for
magazines including Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post in the late
1960s.
He documented the election of Gary's first African-American mayor,
Richard Hatcher, in 1968, and the same year photographed Bobby Kennedy
on a presidential campaign swing through Indiana.
After selling Car-X, he started the Focus-Infinity Fund. The fund took
the cue for its mission from the Farm Security Administration, which
sent Lange, Evans and others out to capture the Depression's effects on
rural America.
With Focus-Infinity backing, 33 photographers spent two years producing
photo essays on all aspects of life in Chicago. The resulting 650 prints
comprised "Changing Chicago," which went on exhibit at five city museums
in 1989.
"It helped get recognition to a whole body of Chicago photographers,"
said Stephen Daiter, whose self-named River North gallery has showcased
Mr. Jaffe's work.
Focus-Infinity also underwrote several books of photography, contributed
to the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Art Institute's
photography department, and even paid for the framing of photographs for
an exhibit staged by a friend of Mr. Jaffe's.
Raised in the South Shore neighborhood, Mr. Jaffe drew cartoons as a
boy. In a display of the chutzpah that carried him throughout life, he
marched down to Tribune Tower with his portfolio to show it to one of
the newspaper's cartoonists, said his wife, Naomi Stern. He got a
meeting and was encouraged to keep working.
After graduating from Hyde Park High School, he studied journalism
toward his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. According to a story he told for years afterward, he
hosted a group of folk singers including Pete Seeger, Brownie McGhee and
Leadbelly in his fraternity house room one night because local hotels
discriminated against blacks, his family said.
Most of his early work was black-and-white photography and depicted
urban settings. After getting a second home in Montana, Mr. Jaffe took
to shooting sweeping Western landscapes.
In remarks on Mr. Jaffe's death written for the Stephen Daiter Gallery,
David Travis, former chairman of the photography department at the Art
Institute, noted that he once placed Mr. Jaffe's work near photographs
by renowned French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson for an exhibit.
"It was not my playing favorites for a man I admired, but because his
work improved the show substantially and made the case as well as any of
the other famous photographic greats displayed on its walls," Travis wrote.
Mr. Jaffe, whose first marriage ended in divorce, is also survived by
three daughters, Hillery Jaffe-Urell, Jill Dunsmore and Sue; and four
grandchildren.
Services are being planned.
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