On the Shoulders of Others

The greatest moment of his photography career? “I can pinpoint it for sure,” says John Simmons without hesitation. It was 2020 and he’d received a letter from the Center for Creative Photography, a museum dedicated to the history of photography. Assuming it was one of many requests to speak on a panel, he left it on the table for several days unopened. Those requests were common, because in addition to his still photography work, Simmons has long worked as a cinematographer and has served as vice president of the American Society of Cinematographers.

That year, he was a governor in the Television Academy. He also had been nominated for an Emmy, so he and his wife were to attend the awards ceremony. As they left the house, Simmons grabbed the envelope to open in the car. It was not a speaking request.

“We would like to welcome you to the history of North American photography,” Simmons read in the letter. “We have selected these 19 images to become part of the canon of American photography history.” The words floored him. “I mean, it came out of nowhere,” Simmons recalls. “I don’t know how they found me. It was like one of the greatest moments in photography that ever happened because suddenly this thing I was playing around with and just in love with suddenly was being taken seriously by this prestigious group of people. And it was just a big moment because it was all about something that I was in love with. I didn’t do it for the money. I never did it for any recognition. And then suddenly it’s, like, important. I was like, Oh my god, the work is not going to disappear.”

Simmons came home with an Emmy that night. “But when I got into the car,” he says, “I just set that Emmy on the backseat and read the letter to my wife again from the Center for Creative Photography,” he says. That’s how much it meant to him to receive recognition for his first love, still photography. 

DOCUMENTING HISTORY

Simmons grew up in Chicago, a city at the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement by the time he was 14. “One thing that happened in the Civil Rights era was there was also a cultural explosion of art, music, dance, poetry,” Simmons says. “Everything hip was happening in Chicago, and I wanted to be a part of that.” His childhood friend Lewis Sengstacke’s family owned The Chicago Daily Defender newspaper, a prominent Black-owned publication that fascinated him. Wanting to engage in the arts like the older kids, Simmons experimented with playing music and writing poetry. Then he noticed Lewis’ older brother Robert "Bobby" Sengstacke’s amazing photography. “All of a sudden, one day I looked at Bobby and realized that he was the hippest cat I knew,” Simmons says. “He took photographs, he had a sports car, he had a girlfriend, he listened to jazz, and he could create this incredible magic in the darkroom where pictures could appear on paper.”

While attending a newspaper publishing convention with the Sengstacke family, Simmons asked Bobby if he could borrow one of his cameras to take pictures of convention attendees. When they processed the images, both Bobby and Simmons were surprised by what he’d created. “You have an eye,” Bobby told Simmons, and he began to teach Simmons photography, sharing with him the works of great street photographers such as Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Dorothea Lange. The newspaper hired Simmons as a lab assistant, and by the time he was 16 and driving, he was taking photography assignments.

“It was a very cool time to be taking pictures,” says Simmons. War protests, political activism, hippies, the free love movement—1960s Chicago served up an abundance of vibrant subject matter. He absorbed all the knowledge he could from Bobby and the other photographers he introduced him to. “I would sit around there and just be lost in anything they might have to say,” he says.

Meanwhile, he captured the images of a lifetime. Photos he made during that pivotal time eventually found their way into some of the most prominent museums in the United States, including The Getty in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. “The photographs—I don’t know—they seem to take on a life of their own,” he says.

Ultimately Bobby became an artist in residence at Fisk University, and showed Simmons’ work to artist David Driskell. As a result, Simmons was awarded a scholarship to Fisk. With the help of his Fisk mentor Carlton Moss and Driskell, Simmons got a scholarship to study cinematography at the University of Southern California after graduating Fisk. That led to his cinematography career, but, Simmons says, still photography has always been a part of his work.

“I think a lot of the things that we all do creatively stand on the shoulders of the people that did it before us,” says Simmons. “Like Bobby Sengstacke … He saw a seed in me and he just watered it. … Those cats changed my life,” he says. “The camera gave me a path, a voice, and created my life.”

SHARED EMOTION

Except when it’s required for a commercial project, Simmons photographs exclusively in black and white. He started using that medium initially to imitate the street photography masters he admired, but says there’s a stronger reason it still resonates. “A black-and-white image cuts straight to the narrative,” he explains. “You don’t get lost in the color. You just have to deal with the story. What story am I trying to tell? What am I trying to share with people? What is it that I’m looking at, and what is it I’m trying to get across? … There is no fluff.”

The challenge for any photographer is “making the camera see what I see,” the late renowned portrait photographer James VanDerZee once told him. Understanding things like balance, composition, tone, and positive and negative space comes from absorbing the works of others, Simmons contends, by going to museums and standing in front of paintings, and looking through photos in magazines and books. “It’s kind of like eating with your eyes,” he says. “It’s kind of like art nourishes a certain part of us.”

He also believes in a kind of serendipity that culminates in his compositions. “Maybe compositions aren’t coincidental,” he posits. “Maybe they are inspired by the emotional reaction to what someone is taking a picture of. It’s always a shared emotion.” He says he is honored that he and his subjects experience it together. “I feel like we were destined to meet each other, to take this moment so that we can share it and it can become immortalized in an image. I feel like it’s not by accident but it’s like I’m supposed to take a picture of this, and they are supposed to be there at that time. Because I can’t make it happen. I can’t go out and look for it. If I could do that, I would have the best pictures in the world.”

Simmons does have a favorite photo: “Christmas Eve” (below), an image he made in 1967 of a mother, whose face can be seen in a reflection in a window, and her two children, one gazing up toward her mother and the other who looks straight into the camera. “I feel like it has so much soul in it, it almost feels religious,” he says of the image.

“My mentor Bobby Sengstacke told me that a photograph has to have a ghost inside of it. It has to have something inside of it that lives beyond the frame—that if it were the only photograph in the room, somebody would be able to get something from it. It doesn’t exist on the basis of your other photography. It has its own energy, its own ghost, its own soul.” Simmons feels this photo has that living spirit. “I feel that photograph is exemplary of everything those cats taught me when I was growing up.”

When people ask Simmons to share stories behind his images, “I don’t know what to say,” he admits. “It’s your feelings that make you click the shutter.” Instead, he prefers people view his photos the way they might view a 16th- or 17th-century painting in a museum. “We can’t talk to the artist,” he says. “The only thing we get is the spirit that lives inside that picture. All we can get is whatever that image gives to us.”  

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.