This book offers a choice selection from a remarkable series of pictures Chicago cab driver and social documentarian Alan Lee Koss took of his passengers from 1977 to 1988. Koss, now nearly 80, has spent most of a lifetime capturing tens of thousands images that time stamp moments from his six decades in the city. His best-known photographs caught protesters amid the mayhem at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He also photographed the civil rights movement. And star performers, including Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. Mostly, however, Koss, who drove the night shift, captured scenes from the streets of Chicago, and people, like those in these portraits, who moved from the street to the backseat of his taxi.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chicago’s North Side presented Koss with an urban backdrop that was both historically varied and undergoing momentous shifts. He shot along the beautiful lakefront and the fading industrial areas along Ashland Avenue. He photographed the rich in their finery and the poor in the work clothes, some of it loose and rugged for heavy industry and some of it neat and nearly fancy for domestics. Koss’s Nikon Light Touch camera, like his Checker cab, didn’t discriminate by race, class or ethnicity. If a passenger agreed to be photographed, he turned his lens backward toward them. Most of his subjects smile. Koss made their ride nicer and memorable with the compliment that came being valued in his eye and by his camera.