Bob Black honored at Brownlee Journalism Series

Our friend and colleague Sun-Times shooter Bob Black’s contributions to the profession will be recognized next Friday, October 7 at the Les Brownlee Lifetime Achievement Awards with 4 other accomplished journalists. (More about Bob below.)

Consider coming to the dinner Friday night at the Chicago Athletic Association on Michigan Ave in Chicago. Details are at
http://www.headlineclub.org/mc/community/eventdetails.do?eventId=63264

More about Bob:
Bob Black started his career as a staff photographer with the Chicago Daily Defender in 1966. He served with the Illinois National Guard’s Signal Corps Battalion, documenting its field operations including Chicago’s west side riots.

In 1968, he joined the Chicago Sun-Times and covered Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination and the resulting riots, the takeover of a Northwestern University administration building by the Black students who felt the school was not addressing their concerns and the Democratic National Convention.

In 1984, Black’s image of a 110-year-old man being kissed on the forehead by his great-great-great-granddaughter was awarded a first place in the World Press Photo of the Netherlands competition. The international panel had reviewed more than 5,000 entries from professional photojournalists in 48 countries.

Black’s photos have appeared in Glamour Magazine, Time, the New York Times, the Newhouse newspaper chain and Jet Magazine. Black also freelances for Community Media Workshop, Centers for New Horizons
Annual Reports, the Tribune McCormick Foundation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

In 1990, he was one of 50 photographers chosen to participate in “Songs of My People,” a book and traveling photographic exhibition project depicting life in the Black community throughout the U.S. His work is also in the books “The African Americans” and “We Come this Far by Faith.”

Black has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout the country. He co-directed, “Journey: The Next Hundred Years,” a photographic project documenting Chicago’s African-American community since the turn of the 21st Century with 250 images by 25 Chicago-area photographers at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

He is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and a founder of its Visual Task Force, the Leica Historical Society of America, and is a founder and past vice president of the Chicago Alliance of African American Photographers.

Black has taught photography classes at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Marwin Foundation, the University of Missouri’s Urban Journalism Program and the Southside Community Art Center, and speaks often at John White’s Columbia College classes and in the city’s public schools.

Black lives on the near Northwest Side with his wife Olga, a photographer in her own right, and son Alejandro.

(Thanks again to Karen Kring for the news)

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