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Photo by Chris Walker
Author Rick Kogan and photographer Charles Osgood, founders of Sidewalks Book Company.
About Sidewalks Book Company
Founded in spring of 2009 Charles Osgood and Rick Kogan, the Sidewalks Book Company is pleased and proud to present Sidewalks II: Reflections on Chicago, the first of what they hope will be a series of books that combine spectacular photography with exceptional writing. There are so many fine photographers and writers in this area whose talents have yet to be fully tapped, so many amazing stories yet to be discovered and told. We want to bring you those artists and those tales, and in so doing illuminate this place we all call home.
About Rick Kogan
Born, raised, and still living in Chicago, Rick Kogan was named Chicago’s Best Reporter in 1999 and inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 2003. He is a senior writer and columnist for the Chicago Tribune and creator/host of The Sunday Papers with Rick Kogan on WGN-AM. Kogan began his journalism career at 16, working for the Chicago Sun-Times during the tumultuous Democratic National Convention of 1968 and in various writing capacities over the next decade.
He was later on the staff of Panorama, the arts and entertainment section of the Chicago Daily News. When that paper ceased publication in 1978, Kogan joined the Sun-Times, where he worked the night shift covering crime, and was entertainment editor, investigative reporter, feature writer, and critic. His weekly columns on the city's nightclub scene were collected in the book Dr. Night Life's Chicago.
By the mid-1980s, he was on the staff of the Chicago Tribune, where he was TV critic for five years and later the editor of Tempo, the paper's daily feature section. For five years he was the personal editor of the syndicated Ann Landers column. A frequent guest on national radio and television shows, he has been an on-air critic for WBBM radio and WBBM-TV; was creator/host of The Sunday Papers on WLUP-FM radio; co-host of the daily Media Creatures program on AM1000 radio; and a featured, Emmy award-winning, weekly commentator on the television program Fox Thing in the Morning.
He has written 12 books, including, in collaboration with his father, Yesterday's Chicago, and in collaboration with Tribune colleague Maurice Possley Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth; as well as America’s Mom: The Life, Lessons and Legacy of Ann Landers; A Chicago Tavern, the history of the Billy Goat; and Sidewalks and Sidewalks II, collections of columns he has written for the Chicago Tribune, embellished by the work of photographer Charles Osgood.See more in Wikipedia.
About Charles Osgood
Charles Osgood was born in Milwaukee and raised in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He graduated from Ripon College and later studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a master of fine arts degree in photography. He began his journalism career as a reporter for City News Bureau, the legendary Chicago training ground for journalists, before going to the Chicago Tribune as a reporter in 1969. After covering town meetings and features in the south suburbs, and taking photographs to run with those stories, he transferred to the photo department, where he remained for nearly 39 years.
His assignments ranged from covering South Side murders on the midnight shift, to food and fashion in the color studio, working full-time on the Sunday Magazine, taking photographs for the Tribune Company annual report, covering “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland and the aftermath of the war in Bosnia, the economic turmoil in the Soviet Union, and Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson’s trip to China. He had his own column, Chicago Arts, consisting of a photo and caption, in the early 1990s.
In 1987, he was assigned to do photos for a story on the Queen of the Blues, Koko Taylor, with Rick Kogan reporting. It was the beginning of a collaboration and friendship that has lasted decades. In 1998, when Kogan asked him if he wanted to partner in a column for which they went out and found their own stories, he couldn’t have been more delighted. He has found it fulfilling on many levels and is inspired by the hunt for stories of fascinating people and places in all corners of the city and the greater Chicago area.
Osgood left the Tribune in 2008 and continues to pursue his lifelong passion for collecting fleeting moments. He has two adult children, Via in L.A. and Zac in Chicago. He has been an adjunct professor of photojournalism at Columbia College since 1991.
