Richard Nickel Dangerous Years: What He Saw and What He Wrote

"Amazing, remarkable, yet tragic" best describes this collage of the life and work of architectural photographer and antiurban renewal conservationist Richard Nickel (1928–72). Culled from the Richard Nickel Papers at Ryerson & Burnham Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago, this mesmerizing study by Cahan and Williams (coauthors, Richard Nickel's Chicago) highlights the passion and career of the man who began as a student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind in 1953 at the Institute of Design documenting the architecture of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. The volume concludes with Nickel's mysterious death at a demolition site. Working to save doomed buildings by Sullivan and other renowned Chicago architects as well as the architectural elements from structures scheduled for razing, Nickel was transformed into a fearless guerilla warrior against the ravages of the war on "urban blight." Filled with illustrations of Nickel's letters, research notes, newspaper clippings, and photographs of landmarks such as the Garrick Theater and the Kennedy Bakery, as well as various derelict offices, factories, and once lavish dwellings of the elite, this work gives depth to the story of a bygone era from Chicago history.