Robert A. Sengstacke

Bobby Sengstacke:

Portrait of an artist

 

He captured the lives of famous and infamous, saints and sinners, kings and commoners. And while he’s been lauded as one of America’s most prolific photographers, Bobby Sengstacke viewed his life’s work in a more holistic way.

"I prefer to view myself as an accomplished artist with a camera, rather than as an accomplished photographer,” Robert Abbott “Bobby” Sengstacke once told an interviewer. “My journey of self-discovery encompassed a desire to achieve a sense of contentment” through my work.

               That “journey of self-discovery” would take the award-winning photographer to the top of his field, where his work ultimately would appear in the nation’s leading publications, including The Chicago Defender, LIFE magazine, Ebony, Jet, Essence, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune.

It was a journey that seemed almost destined to happen.

Named after his uncle, Chicago Defender founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott, Sengstacke was born May 29, 1943 in Chicago, where he was the second of three sons born to Myrtle Picou-Sengstacke and John H.H. Sengstacke – the Defender’s owner and publisher.

Bobby Sengstacke painted and drew as a young child and was drawn to photography at age 14 when his father gave him his first camera. Two years later, he accompanied his father on a trip to Cuba, where he took a picture of Fidel Castro with heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis.

And a passion was ignited.

Sengstacke attended the University of Chicago Lab School, Manumit boarding school in Bristol, Pennsylvania and Howalton Day School before attending Hyde Park High School and ultimately graduating from Central YMCA High School in 1962.

Artistic and frequently nomadic, he attended Florida’s Bethune-Cookman College for three and a half years before returning to Chicago, where he ultimately would become lead photographer and editor for his family’s iconic newspaper and the first non-Muslim staff photographer at the highly regarded Muhammad Speaks.

In the late 1950s, a group of African American photographers in Chicago launched an informal campaign to combat negative images of African Americans in the media. Years later, Sengstacke would join the lofty mission.

“They began to see themselves as graphic historians who had a common purpose of documenting the African American experience through eyes of love, pride and strength,” the longtime Hyde Park resident told an interviewer.

 

In that tradition, Sengstacke launched his own journey of self-discovery and purpose. Equipped with a camera and a burgeoning social consciousness, he began to help chronicle the dawn of the civil rights movement.

For more than 50 years, he documented African American culture through multi-media visual arts, capturing the images of such stalwart figures as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Harold Washington, Gus Savage, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Imamu Baraka, and scores of other icons of black culture and society.

His disappointment with white media images of Dr. King inspired Sengstacke to document King in a way that captured the essence of the civil rights leader’s authentic character and personality.

Sengstacke ultimately would become one of Chicago’s most prolific documentary photographers, a man best known for capturing the gritty and the beautiful among Chicago's neighborhoods, all the while portraying the essence of African American culture and experience.

His highly acclaimed photos earned national and international recognition, winning acclaim at the Statue of Liberty and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which houses a repository of 50 of Sengstacke’s King photographs and 20 of the Nation of Islam. Sengstacke also was the first black photographer from Chicago to have a major photo exhibition in Chicago's Loop at the main branch of the Chicago Public Library in 1969.

Other Sengstacke photos have appeared in dozens of other venues, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Newseum in Arlington, Va., the Studio Museum in Harlem, the DuSable Museum of African American History, Stanford University, Spelman College, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Circle Campus, the University of Illinois Urbana campus and the University of Minnesota.

Sengstacke also was co-founder of the Museum of Science and Industry’s Black Creativity program, an art exhibition that showcases African-American achievement in various scientific, artistic and technology fields. Founded in 1970, it is the nation's longest-running exhibition of African-American art.

Acclaimed art historian David Driskell once lauded Sengstacke’s work, saying: “The visual record which Bobby has given black and white America through his photography in these turbulent decades will add memorable pages to the history and culture of a young nation still groping with the problems and pains of becoming a free society.”

The New York Times agreed, once defining the award-winning photojournalist as "one of the most significant photographers of the civil rights generation."

While well-known figures often graced his canvass, however, Sengstacke had a special affection for the stories of ordinary people. He also had a special affinity for young people – a passion he nurtured as a mentor and teacher at Columbia College in Chicago and as an artist in residence at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.

In addition to his highly regarded creative acumen, Sengstacke also held several administrative and management positions in journalism, including president of Sengstacke Newspapers, former editor of the Chicago Daily Defender, and editor and general manager of the Memphis Tri-State Defender. He also maintained a video production company that produced nearly 60 film documentaries, including two award winners at the Berlin Film Festival.

In 2006, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism presented “The Passage: Chicago Streets to African Roads,” an exhibit of more than 30 pictures from Sengstacke and other members of the Chicago Alliance of African-American Photographers (CAAP). At that event, Sengstacke was honored with CAAP’s highest award, The Gordon Parks Award for Leadership – an award given to a photographer who best represents leadership in photography, filmmaking and or multi-media.

 “This is one of the greatest honors that I have ever received,” Sengstacke told audience members after receiving the coveted award. “To get this kind of recognition from my contemporaries is beyond my words.”

Sengstacke is survived by his wife, Jacquelyn Sengstacke, and their two children, Domenic and Jasmine; his ex-wife, VeeLa Sengstacke-Gonzales, and their children, Myiti, Omhari and Hasani. Their oldest son, Saief, made his transition in 2009.

Other survivors include his daughter-in-law. Shantella; his grandchildren, Imani, Malahni and Montrel; mother-in-law, Christein H. Spencer; sister-in-law, Jocelyn F. Spencer; brother-in-law, Delano D. Spencer; former mother-in-law, Neely Caldwell, and dozens of loving family members and close friends.