Chicago Tribune - Capone: A Photographic Portrait of America’s Most Notorious Gangster

The images of Al Capone in this book were digitized from glass-plate negatives and original prints made from glass plates. These plates had been stored for decades in the deepest of basement storage rooms at the Tribune Tower, five levels below Michigan Avenue street level. Protected in paper envelopes, the plates were filed haphazardly. They were only recently located and brought up to the newsroom for scanning.

We had located buried treasure. Despite some degrading of the emulsion around the edges, most were in remarkably good shape. Because of the size of the plates, and the advancements in digital scanning, incredible detail can now be seen spats, hats and smirks.

A small number of prints in folders filed in our old fourth-floor library were also scanned. Few of those images had been published before, but only once, and stored away in the stacks. The original glass plates associated with those prints have not been found, but the prints were so interesting and high quality that we included them in this collection. During Capones lifetime, photographic techniques evolved from glass plates to 4-by-5 black-and-white film negatives. By the time Capone died in 1947, all of the photo coverage of his funeral was recorded on film.

The images were taken by photographers of the Chicago Tribune as well as the now-defunct Chicago Herald-Examiner and Chicago American. Those newspapers archives folded into the Tribune archives when they went out of business.

Try to comprehend the difficulty of making glass-plate negatives in that era. News events were especially challenging news photographers carried heavy Speed Graphic cameras that held 4-by-5-inch glass plates. Only one plate could be exposed at a time, so for every new photograph, another plate had to be loaded. Oftentimes the press photographers would shoot fewer than a dozen plates on assignment. Compare that with the hundreds of digital images typically taken by todays Chicago Tribune photojournalists on their daily assignments.

Some of these digitized glass-plate images have never been published. And when the unpublished plates were stored away at the Tower after being developed, perhaps only the photographer and certain editors had glanced at these outtakes. So its our pleasure to share these visual documents of a crime boss known around the world.

Robin Daughtridge
Associate Managing Editor / Photography and Video
Chicago Tribune