Bob Natkin, Photographer

The dustjacket has some light rubbing at edges. A gallery catalog. Photos throughout; 48 pages. Bob Natkin (American, 1919-1996) started taking picture in high school, developing and printing in a friend's basement. At age 21 he was drafted and abruptly went from being a student in pre-med to being an Air Force gunner photographer during World War II. Afterwards, Natkin became a professional photographer, primarily capturing people in their environments all over his beloved Chicago. He also made remarkable images on a trip to Mexico in 1948, photographing the mexican people in ways quite unanticipated by those who had commissioned the work. These disparate scenarios have in common Natkin's skillful technique and compassionate rendering. The Daiter exhibit focuses on images taken from 1948 to 1953. ?It was a period of intense early creativity for him,? says Berlanga. Some of the best pictures were taken while he was doing an assignment for the Mexican tourism bureau?men walking a row of pigs down the street, an organgrinder looking furtively over his shoulder, a family waiting impatiently at a bus station. ?The sincerity and the intensity of many of the images he took down in Mexico are not the standard issue of what a tourist board would use to get tourists to go south of the border,? says Berlanga. The photos taken in Chicago that make up the rest of the exhibit have the same unadorned naturalism, whether they?re of narcotics court or the 1952 Republican National Convention, of popular entertainers or residents of the city?s slums.…