Snap decision

In his memoir Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain describes Chicago as “…hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with…she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty, for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”

Twain’s observation holds true as page after page of Light: On the South Side resurrects a small slice of long-gone Chicago nightlife. Light collects 110 black-and-white photographs taken by Michael Abramson in African-American bars and clubs with names like Pepper’s Hideout, Perv’s House, High Chapparal and the Patio Lounge from 1975 to 1977. And yet, there is a transcendent accessibility to Light: On the South Side that makes it more than a beautiful artifact. Everyone will recognize scenes of love, lust, machismo, flirtatiousness, barroom drama and the glorious rush of dance parties in full swing.

“Nightlife is eternal,” says Abramson. “No matter where you go, a lot of it is the same old stuff. The clothing might be different, the language might be different, but it’s always the same. It is an international language.” Abramson, a white New Jersey native, moved to Chicago to study photography at the Illinois Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and was living in Evanston when his roommate told him about Pepper’s Hideout.

“I had just acquired a flash and hadn’t used it much, so I thought, ‘I’m gonna go check this out,’” he says. “The first time I went down there, I walked in the door, I checked it out, and after about ten minutes, I thought, ‘I can’t do this. Not tonight.’ I started walking out the door, and someone said, ‘Hey, where ya goin’?’”

For the next three years, Abramson was a fixture at Pepper’s (“The experience was better than the pictures,” he recalls), taking what he estimates to be four thousand to five thousand pictures. His life had become a routine of taking classes at IIT, playing some basketball, eating in the cafeteria, then heading over to Pepper’s Hideout (which, at 2335 South Prairie Avenue, was close to the IIT campus) by 9 or 10pm to check out the action. Abramson describes the action at Pepper’s as “Like cabaret. It had blues, great music, but it also had young kids in bump dance contests, it had Lady Ann’s Transvestite Review, it had the Sexy Mamas Social Club. I was quite aware that this was a specific scene that wasn’t my scene, and that was what was wonderful and exciting about it.”

After three years, the scenes and clubs fizzled out, and Abramson felt, as he says in the book’s afterward, “the possibilities were exhausted.” Since that time, while launching a successful photography career that has taken him around the world, Abramson talked to large publishing houses and academic presses. Nothing panned out until Abramson received an e-mail from “Minister T” from Chicago reissues label the Numero Group: “Wanna do a book?” “They were so excited by it, they reinvigorated my interest,” Abramson says. “It was so outside the normal photographic routes of publishing. It was a perfect fit.”

Light: On the South Side also contains two LPs called Pepper’s Jukebox, and an introduction by Nick Hornby. Anyone familiar with Numero’s exquisite packaging, aesthetic and tastes will find this, its 33rd release, another top-notch addition to its admirable catalog. Light: On the South Side is a testament to the city’s constant flux and the universality of its nightlife.

Abramson discusses his book Sunday 1 at the Cultural Center. Click here to seem more images from Light: On the South Side.

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