He prefers to work in black and white and has perfected a stark chiaroscuro style which brings out successive depths of black, strewn with soft brilliants of light. Usually carrying two or three cameras, Steve stands quietly out of the way, clicking through a bag of film. He will bring home hundreds of exposures, and out of a humanly complex event, one that would take you an hour to recount, he will produce a few photos that let loose just the spirit of that happening. Often one or two will be pure magic-black and white magic: icons of all that was at stake in people's hearts and lives in the unfolding of a particular day. It occasionally annoys clients who expect an ordered commercial sequence of some sponsored chronicle of a ceremony, but then comes an image which exposes the soul of the day's human episode-the one photograph that discloses almost more than one would like put on display. This knack has made him an effective teacher of photography, not only in academic settings such as the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University at South Bend, but also among school dropouts in Evanston, elementary pupils, and adults in inner-city Chicago. Some photographs need no captions. Doris Ulmann's dignified portraits of southerners-both black and white-from the twenties and early thirties tell full stories by themselves. Edward Steichen's portraits would be just as hypnotic if you didn't know the identities of his famous sitters. Ansel Adams's Yosemite series would have its way with you even without titles. On the other hand, for W. Eugene Smith's (another Notre Dame photographer) exposé of the mercury- poisoned villagers of Minamata, or Robert Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War, or Sebastião Salgado's desolate depiction of the starving victims of the drought in the African Sahel-each needs a thousand words, besides, to tell its story. Once told, in their violent sorrow, the stories are invested forever in the photographs. Steve has shown photographs that need no stories. His Chicago Hitchhikers (1973), Time on the El (1975), In the House of Rodin (1976), The Curtain (1976), and Revelation (1977) are items from his work that go without saying.