From 1977 to 1980, while working at Columbia College Chicago and then the LIGHT Gallery in Midtown, photographer Charles H. Traub would hang out on the street during his lunch hour and ask people if he could take their portrait with his trusty Rolleiflex. During those years Traub took approximately 400 portraits, which are now collected in a new book called Lunchtime, which will be released by Damani Press in late September (you can pre-order it here, though).

Following an artistic impulse that would baffle any self-respecting paparazzo, Traub was so intent on capturing the regular citizen in the street that he turned down the chance to shoot a trio of world-class celebrities. “Jackie Kennedy once stopped and said, ‘If you want to take my picture, please be quick,’ and I said no,” says Traub. “Just moments later Yoko Ono and John Lennon walked by and did the same thing. I took neither of their pictures because that wasn’t what I was there to do. I avoided celebrities.”
 

 
The photographs capture the marvelous originality and individuality that people exhibit just by being themselves. So many of the great iconic photographs from the 1970s are black and white; Traub’s bold use of color marks these pics as belonging, spiritually, to the decade to follow. Indeed, the lack of dating is somewhat remarkable, you could almost believe these were taken in 2015. As Traub says, “I had taken very few color photos prior, but I realized to really see the world, if you will, or to document it in terms of human information, that color was essential.” Naturally, the exaggerated fashions of the 1970s, now sadly a thing of the past, and a refreshing lack of self-consciousness difficult to reproduce in our own Instagram age, help make these portraits pop even more than they would otherwise.

Taken as a whole, the pics seem like a groovier, proto-version of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York project. They also call to mind the early documentaries of Errol Morris or the introductory section to the video for “California Girls” by David Lee Roth. 
 

 

 

 

 

 
More great Lunchtime photographs after the jump…...