Jack Jaffe
1928 – 2010
Board member
Jack Jaffe introduced himself to the Maxwell Street Foundation (MSF) at a time when the MSF was endeavoring to have a brick and mortar museum. Jack’s contribution was the coordination of a photographic portfolio composed of Maxwell Street photographs by select Chicago photographers, including himself, that could be sold as a fundraising arm. With the assistance of Foundation board members Elliot Zashin and Ed Hirschland, the limited edition portfolio was completed and is currently managed by Ed Hirschland (editor for the portfolio). Jack was also an avid trout fisherman and owned a second home in Bozman, Montana where he fly-fished and almost always showed up at any event in Chicago in his fly fishing vest. Jack started the Car-X auto-repair company before selling it in the mid-1980s and turning his full attention to photography. His work is represented by the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago. Jack also oversaw a two-year photo project, “Changing Chicago,” involving 33 photographers and 650 prints; and contributed to the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Art Institute of Chicago’s photography department, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune also wrote that Jack was “inspired by the photographers who documented life in America like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lang,” and “took a journalistic approach” to photography. Jaffe’s work was published in Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post.
Jack wrote in his own biography that, “I was intrigued by the idea that an art form could also make social comment.”