For decades, Ebony and Jet were among the most important publications documenting Black American life and culture, making Johnson Publishing Company the era’s most influential Black-owned media corporation. Completed in 1972, its headquarters at 820 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago gave that cultural presence a physical form. More than 40 years later, photographer Barbara Karant began documenting the now-abandoned building, capturing its kaleidoscopic patterns, mirrored surfaces, and remarkably intact 1970s interiors. Her photographs are now collected in 820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, a new monograph from MW Editions that preserves the building and its design legacy.
Photography courtesy of courtesy MW Editions
The headquarters was significant before anyone stepped inside. Publisher John H. Johnson had faced resistance from real estate agents and bankers wary of financing a Black-owned company, and ultimately commissioned John Moutoussamy, the first Black architect to design a downtown Chicago high-rise. Rather than the glass-and-steel towers common to the era, Johnson wanted a building with permanence and character. Moutoussamy delivered a restrained exterior clad in travertine marble.
Photography courtesy MW Editions
Inside, restraint gave way to something far more expressive. Palm Springs designers Arthur Elrod and William Raiser gave each of the building’s 11 floors its own combination of color and pattern, creating interiors that reflected Johnson Publishing Company’s cultural ambitions as much as its corporate identity. The cafeteria paired orange, purple, and gold chevrons, while co-founder Eunice Johnson’s cream-and-honey office incorporated pieces from the couple’s art collection. Geometric wallpapers, mirrored surfaces, bold carpets, and richly patterned finishes appeared throughout.
Photography courtesy MW Editions
Remarkably, much of that design remained unchanged until Johnson Publishing Company left the building in 2012. Karant began photographing the empty headquarters the following year and continued through 2018. With the furnishings gone, she focused her lens on the surfaces and details that defined the interiors: geometric wallpapers, mirrored dressing rooms, and the Test Kitchen’s swirling laminate cabinetry, whose psychedelic patterning recalls Italian marbled paper. Mirrors double and multiply motifs within her compositions, while the executive floor’s picture windows bring Lake Michigan and Grant Park into view.
Photography courtesy MW Editions
The building’s emptiness is part of what gives the photographs their power. Stripped of the people, magazines, and day-to-day activity that once animated the headquarters, the rooms become studies in color, pattern, and material—but also records of a workplace and cultural institution that no longer exists in this form.
The book broadens that record with documentary images of the original interiors and Ebony’s in-house photo studio, as well as Richard Hunt’s site-specific lobby sculpture, Expansive Construction (1972). Recollections from former employees add firsthand accounts of life inside the building, while the book also traces its influence on artists including Theaster Gates, Hank Willis Thomas, Kwame Brathwaite, Lorna Simpson, Martine Syms, and David Hartt.
Photography courtesy MW Editions
At 240 pages, 820 Ebony/Jet brings together 142 color and eight black-and-white images, with a foreword by artist Deborah Willis and essays by Aaron Bryant, Cheryl Finley, Carla Williams, Jon Ott, Brenna Wynn Greer, and E. James West. The book preserves a remarkable chapter of American design history—and the physical environment created for two publications that helped shape how Black American life was seen, documented, and celebrated.
Published by MW Editions, 820 Ebony/Jet: Visions of the Johnson Publishing Company, an American Icon, is available Oct. 13 for $65.
