Take My Picture is a rich document of 1980s Black gay Chicago curated by Juarez Hawkins. Long before the selfie phenomenon, a young Patric McCoy traveled around Chicago on his bicycle, always with his camera. Over a ten year period, he shot thousands of images of Black men who asked to have their pictures taken. The Rialto Tap fed McCoy’s muse. The South Loop bar was one of the few places where Black men could socialize with, and seduce, other Black men. From drag queens to downtown professionals, the Rialto packed in men from all walks of life, providing a steady stream of subjects for McCoy and his camera. Throughout the 80s, HIV/AIDS hit Black men especially hard. Thousands would die before the end of the decade, including many of McCoy’s friends, lovers—and subjects. Take My Picture becomes even more important as a marker of place, time, and memory. McCoy fulfilled an unspoken need for Black men to be seen.

Learn about McCoy’s passions and practice in this interview, conducted by Wrightwood 659 Assistant Curator Ashley Janke.

AJ: Can you speak about your early photography influences and initial relationship with the medium? 

Patric McCoy: My father was an avid amateur photographer throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and we always had his photographs in our home. He would photograph us and make exciting Christmas and holiday cards, so my brother and I always had outstanding pictures of ourselves throughout the time when we were kids. As I got older, I found out my grandmother had taken a lot of photographs from the 1910s through the 1940s. She took candid and posed pictures of people with her Brownie Instamatic. Also, her mother collected many photographs of family members from the turn of the century, so I am just one in a long line of people who kept a large number of photos in their world.

My father and older brother dove deep into photography as a practice and explored its technicalities. However, I was not interested in the technical process; I just enjoyed capturing images.

AJ: When did you start experimenting with photography, and what was your approach to self-teaching?

PM: Starting in the 60s and through the 70s, I had a point-and-shoot camera, and I used it a lot. I took better pictures than most with those kinds of cameras. One of my best friends worked at the Helix camera store in the early 80s. He admonished me, “you need to get a 35mm camera and learn how to do photography and stop using point-and-shoot cameras.” That’s when I got my first 35mm SLR. I had a lot of trepidation getting it because I did not want to follow the same path in photography as my brother and father. So I thought, “Okay, I’m not going to take classes; I am going to teach myself how to use the camera and commit to doing it daily; I will learn photography organically.”

I wrote out a commitment on December 20th, 1984, that I had to carry the camera everywhere, every day, and if someone asked me to take their photo, I would stop and take their picture. I did put in a little protection clause regarding that type of activity, i.e., I would stop as long as it didn’t put me in danger and I wouldn’t get hurt.

Most of these photos in the exhibition were taken in 1985 when I followed through on this commitment. I did not think anybody would ask me to take their photo when I wrote it. It turns out that it was the main thing, and people, especially Black men, were hungry to be photographed. When they saw me with a camera hanging off my neck riding on a bicycle, they would usually call out to me and say, “Take my picture!” Most of the people calling out to me didn’t believe I would do it, but I had committed, so I would stop and take their picture. I would always respond to them however they presented themselves. I would never tell them to move or smile or anything. I would try my best to capture them in the best light. I ended up spending that whole year doing portraits because so many people asked to be photographed!

AJ: How many photographs do you think you took that year?

PM: Thousands and thousands of photos! Well, in 2008, I scanned about 1,500 images from the box of all the accumulated negatives (jumbled up and in no order) from that period, and that was just a tiny fraction of what was in the box! So, in 2008 I saw images for the first time since I took the photographs in the 1980s. The photos in this show are a small sample out of the 1,500 I scanned in 2008. I have never seen most of the images printed out.

AJ: There were some you took but never developed?

PM: Oh yeah, of course. You see after I started this activity in 1985, my father saw what I was doing and put together a dark room in his basement. We lived not far away from each other, so he was trying to encourage me to get better at photography. A friend gave me developing equipment, supplies, and an enlarger, so I had everything I needed to print in black and white at my father’s house. I would stop by his house after work to develop the film and print some of the shots.

It became a routine where I’d be out taking photos during the day and then return to print them as 5x7s that night. I put together a stack of those 5×7 photos and carried them in my backpack on the off chance I would see the subjects again and give them their picture. It turned out that because my commuting route on the bicycle went through the same neighborhoods, many of the subjects would see me again, and I would say, “Hey, I have a picture for you!” Most Black people at that time did not have good photographs of themselves. It was heartwarming to watch when they would see and receive (for free) a really good photo of themselves. That same process of photographic exchange would occur in and around the Rialto because the patrons would see the camera and ask me to take their picture.

AJ: You said you didn’t realize there was such a hunger for Black men to be photographed. Where do you think that desire came from?

PM: Well, it’s endemic. I think every individual has a hunger to be depicted in a recognizable and positive light. People want to see themselves and be represented. That’s why we go to museums to look at images. They help us reflect on who we are. The broader white society has had centuries of their images being represented and projected as important. But African Americans—we haven’t a long history of such; it’s really kind of new.

At the time I was doing this photography, i.e., during the Reagan era, young Black men were in special need of it. There was a recession, a lot of people were out of work, and there was a big increase of people on welfare systems which had shifted from supporting families to supporting single mothers. Young Black fathers were being pushed out of the government-aided system where there was food and public housing. They were cast out and depicted as not wanting to care for their families, but I did not see it that way. In fact, many of the young men that frequented the Rialto were fathers, and their physical presence there followed a monthly cycle of when the social workers would do inspections of their family’s spaces in public housing.

AJ: You captured a large number of photographs between 1984 and 1986. Could you describe how your relationship with photography evolved during that period?

PM: I started taking photos around 1981 when a friend recommended getting a 35 mm camera. By the end of 1984, I had gained the confidence to pursue photography seriously, and that’s when I made the commitment. I continued to take photos throughout the rest of the decade. In 1985 alone, I took thousands of photographs, and my collection grew even larger over the years. People soon learned that I was willing to take their picture and give them a copy, so they would often ask me for one whenever they saw me. This is why certain individuals frequently appear in my collection—they knew I would never turn down their request for a photo.

AJ: You took fewer photos in the 1990s. What factors contributed to your reduced output? 

PM: Well, the Rialto was located at 14 West Van Buren, and it was in the way of the construction of the Harold Washington Library. We knew the whole block would be razed and that the Rialto would eventually be closed at the end of 1989; consequently, I lost one of my primary sources of imagery. It was the end of that chapter, and I stopped, partly because the subjects were gone.

But most significantly, from the end of 1988 to 1995, the federal government arrested the heads of two major gangs, the El Rukns (Blackstone Ranges) and the Gangster Disciples. These gangs controlled the drug traffic in Chicago through the 70s and 80s, but after they were destroyed, their hierarchies broke up, and the structure they imposed to keep crack cocaine out of Chicago fell apart. Throughout the 80s, most other U.S. cities were wiped out by the crack cocaine epidemic, but not Chicago. After the gangs were destroyed, crack cocaine flooded into our city, and the crack epidemic hit 1990s Chicago almost overnight.

It became impossible to keep anything valuable on you. I was replacing my camera over and over again because of theft in the first year of the 90s until I just said, “forget it.” Otherwise, I would have continued because I had caught the photography bug.

AJ: What aspects of your photography practice do you carry with you?

PM: The act of learning photography was the act of seeing. It forced me to look at the world in a whole different way. I learned how to see, and once I started recognizing that, I began to push the way I saw more and more.

I now recognize that most people were like I was in the beginning. They operate with blinders; they only see what they are thinking about and what’s right in front of them. They don’t see all of what is actually going on. Meanwhile, photographers, painters, and other visual artists see something more. They see something real. Painters see the true color, the variations in tone, and when they add purple to a portrait of your face, somehow, it works. Photographers see things in relation to each other and the effects of light on objects. That’s what I learned, and it’s still fascinating to me.