By Leah Bobal
Stromberg was the right guy to make something out of nothing. He knew how to go his own way. “I didn’t much care for school,” he remembers. “I was always getting into fights in grammar school. I was one of those obnoxious kids making fart noises in the back of the classroom. Mrs. Levy, my fourth-grade teacher, always called me a non compos mentis congenital idiot. I believed her. The only problem was, I knew what she meant. A non compos mentis congenital idiot would not know what she meant.”
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After Costas called, Stromberg spent his nights behind the wheel of a Yellow Cab and his days at the Jane Addams Center. To raise seed money for the photography program, he put on a film festival. Photographers James Hunt and Darryl Muhrer wandered in to see it and and volunteered to help.
Stromberg, Hunt, and Muhrer were putting up a darkroom with borrowed tools when Costas decided to move the drug program out of the Jane Addams Center. “By the time we were ready to have our first class, there were no kids,” says Stromberg. “We had to look at ourselves and ask, ‘What does a photography program do at Hull House?’ We realized that this really didn’t fall into the definition of social service–feeding the hungry, clothing the poor.”
Muhrer, a semiprofessional photo-grapher, shaped the program’s curriculum while working on his master’s degree in education. Then he left to finish his graduate work, and he’s now a performance artist. Stromberg and James Hunt, who was an artist and photojournalist, continued as a team until 1979, when Hunt moved to Minnesota. Hunt was killed in a car crash in 1985. Stromberg keeps his name in his Palm Pilot. “Jim once said to me, ‘Using the darkroom facility in exchange for volunteer work has been the best deal of my life.’ The program would not exist without him and, at this point, thousands of people like him.”
Stromberg’s hardheadedness still gets him into trouble. Not ten minutes into an introductory class, he’s laying into a student who didn’t bring her roll of botched negatives. “Are you qualified to know what happened?” he shouts across the room. “You must bring it in so I can tell you what happened! I’m gonna be able to tell you for sure.” The other students hastily surrender their negatives. Holding a set up to the fluorescent light, Stromberg squints and tells one student hers are underdeveloped. “Well, you see, I think that might have been just me being an idiot,” she comments. “Well, there seems to be a lot of that going on,” he says.
Some students asked how she could tolerate him. “He doesn’t like to be told that he’s wrong,” Rublev allows. “I just tell them when he pushes, you should push back.” Stromberg was so impressed by her dedication that he asked her to become director of the new gallery. “I gave her the same deal I got 30 years ago–we have no money to pay you, but we want a gallery,” he says. The spirit of his program has never changed. “I have malpractice attorneys, architects, and other professionals teaching Basic Photo 1 Darkroom not for the money but because they love it. We work very hard at creating a culture that doesn’t permit arrogance, elitism, or snobbery. It’s a community program that survives on volunteerism.” The program also depends on tuition–which ranges from $225 to $275 for an eight-week class. Hull House pays Stromberg $24,000 a year to work 35 hours a week, and he typically puts in 50 to 70. “I just do what’s necessary,” he says.
