Meteorological terms excluded, Chicago's other nickname is "the City with Clout." Many of the city's residents take perverse delight in the knowledge that their hometown embraces an abundance of peculiar social groups. The National Socialist White People's Party, more commonly known as the American Nazi Party, was founded in Virginia in the 1960's. The resilient midwestern strain, although perhaps not exactly flourishing, was able to keep a high profile by embroiling itself in controversy for the better part of two decades. Much of the time, to the chagrin of the Chicago city fathers, the Nazis practiced a literal translation of the town's nickname.

 

I chose to photograph the American Nazi Party as a part of my graduate thesis for my MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I not only tried to photograph the American Nazi Party members, but also strove to include images of the members of the opposition; the Jewish Defense League. Some of the pictures below were taken at rallies in Marquette Park on Chicago's southside. Other images were taken at Nazi demonstrations held in the Chicago suburbs where many Holocaust survivors had immigrated after the war. Additional photos were made inside Rockwell Hall, the Nazi's headquarters. Ironically, nearly forty years to the date and purely by coincidence, I started my portrait series of the WW II Holocaust survivors from the German Nazi concentration camp of Terezin. It is the same camp that some of the survivors who had move to Chicago had been imprisioned.