There is no Nat Turner memorial in Southampton County. No museum or documentation center. There are only fragments of buildings, and Turner’s sword remains under lock and key in the county courthouse. Primarily, there is the landscape, largely frozen in time, as memorial in itself. How do you photograph that which is missing? How do you fill in the gaps in the story? In the picture above, somewhere along the trail of Turner’s path of righteous destruction, a grove of mature trees marks the location where a farmhouse once stood. Sometimes absence and presence blend into one another, and the past and present conjoin and occupy the same ground.
I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and as a result, was steeped in American history. I was a member of the Colonial Williamsburg Fifes and Drums, and with the corps, played for two U.S. presidents and many other heads of state and dignitaries.
Colonial Williamsburg, from the beginning, told an idealized, and sanitized, version of American history. The triumph of liberty over tyranny. The restored houses and reconstructions were of clean white clapboard. The decorative gardens and tidy rear kitchens suggested an orderly and civilized society. The presence of slave labor was not dwelled upon, though acknowledged as a temporary evil eventually to be done away with. Jefferson, Washington, and Patrick Henry were portrayed as heroes who not only stood up to a despot, but inspired the creation of a new nation, democratic and egalitarian. The founding fathers were towering figures.
They were – but we see them now through less rosy glasses, and in recent decades, the foundation has made much progress in telling the full narrative. The enslaved are now included as integral to the 18th century colonial capital, and recently, CW commemorated the restoration of the Bray School, a building from 1760 that was dedicated to the education of black children. The Colonial Williamsburg website states without mincing words that: “the school’s faith-based curriculum justified slavery and encouraged those who were enslaved to accept their destinies.”
Whatever its shortcomings, the central mission of Colonial Williamsburg remains “”That the future may learn from the past.”
We have just elected a president who is a repudiation of the ideals of Jefferson and Washington. A vulgar disreputable criminal. A rapist. A man with no character and no moral compass, and certainly, no sense of history to learn from. Will Colonial Williamsburg survive this debauchery of American history. Will the Republic survive?
I just finished reading David Browne’s meticulously researched four-decade history of the Greenwich Village music scene. In my other life, I was part of this world – a fledgling songwriter, co-founder of the Fast Folk Musical Magazine, and occasional photographer of my musician friends. Although my role in Browne’s narrative does not quite reach the centrality that it does in the imaginary movie of myself, I am mentioned several times in the book and cannot complain. I also contributed a photograph taken in front of Folk City in 1981.
Having been intimately involved with many of the events and people depicted in the book, I can attest to its remarkable accuracy. Browne, a senior writer with Rolling Stone, has attempted a definitive history here, which is pretty ambitious, and he weaves together many different threads with skill. There are several main characters in the story, but the most important is Dave Van Ronk, whose influential presence and career, spans almost the entire timeline of the book. A difficult task was including the mostly parallel Village jazz scene with innovators like Miles Davis and John Coltrane alongside the folk scene with songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. I understand why Browne did it, but sticking to the folk music scene might have made for a less complex narrative structure.
One of my favorite parts of the book is a delirious description of the 1975 birthday party for Folk City owner Mike Porco.
“For the expanding crowd inside, the evening grew only more Fellini-esque, with a mélange of folk, spoken word, and cabaret moments that recalled an earlier, headier time in the Village—a grown-up version of the old Gaslight. Patti Smith improvised a poem. Ginsberg recited from William Blake. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, who’d become part of the Other End hang-out crew, materialized to play “Chestnut Mare” and “I’m So Restless,” the latter with its sly dig at Dylan’s semi-retirement. Bette Midler, who’d also befriended Dylan, sashayed toward the stage and joined Buzzy Linhart on his song “Friends,” which had become an anthem for her.”
Browne, David. Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital (p. 242). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.
Lower income housing north of the elevated subway line in Coney Island.
6sqft:
“After World War II, Coney Island’s popularity began to fade, especially when Robert Moses made it his personal mission to replace the resort area’s amusements with low-income, high-rise residential developments. But ultimately, it was Fred Trump, Donald’s father, who sealed Steeplechase’s fate, going so far as to throw a demolition party when he razed the site in 1966 before it could receive landmark status.”
Trump invited guests to the demo party to throw bricks through the glass facade with its iconic grinning face. Fred also had plans to develop the former Luna Park site, but could not acquire government financing because he and his son were sued by the U.S. Government for racial descrimination. Instead, Robert Moses erected his customary forest of low income towers just north of the elevated subway line across the street from the amusement park.
“This sad event,” Charles Denson, the executive director of the Coney Island History Project, wrote in conjunction with the exhibition’s debut last summer, “was a vindictive and shameful act by a grown man behaving like a juvenile delinquent. It wasn’t business—it was personal. The desecration of an icon and the breaking of glass as public spectacle revealed a twisted personality that was unusual for even the most hard-bitten developers.”
“It’s almost the equivalent of ISIS tearing down religious icons, because the Steeplechase face was so iconic and really represented Coney Island,” Denson told me Saturday.
“Horrifying,” he called what Fred Trump did.
“Barbaric,” said Tricia Vita, the administrative director of the History Project.
The grinning funny face of Steeplechase Park lives on as the de facto logo of Coney Island.
After much research and soul searching, I made an exploratory journey to Southampton County in southern Virginia. A deep dive into the darkest heart of America. I am on my way to Courtland, Virginia to tour the route of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion of 1831. My hotel just off I-95 is next to a truck stop with fast food and, thankfully, a Starbucks. Down the road that parallels the freeway, the Blue Star Highway, I found Los Compadres Mexican. The crowd was Trumpy looking – one man had a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Virginia is for Hunters” – but the vibe was good, the food spectacular, and the Mexican restaurant staff, apparently, on friendly terms with the locals.
Rick Francis, the county clerk, led the tour that followed the route of Nat Turner’s murderous rampage through the countryside of Southampton County, the biggest slave revolt in American history. We traveled together by bus, a group of both whites and blacks, some locals and some who drove in from miles away, like me. Some had family connections to the people of 1831 when the uprising took place, but few were as close as mine. More on that later.
I was thirty-one years of age the 2nd of October last, and born the property of Benj. Turner, of this county. In my childhood a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind, and laid the ground work of that enthusiasm, which has terminated so fatally to many, both white and black, and for which I am about to atone at the gallows. It is here necessary to relate this circumstance–trifling as it may seem, it was the commencement of that belief which has grown with time, and even now, sir, in this dungeon, helpless and forsaken as I am, I cannot divest myself of.
A steady soaking rain kept us in the bus most of the day, but I jumped out here and there and made pictures mostly from the road. There aren’t many structures still standing from 1831, but the landscape remains relatively unchanged and relatively undeveloped. This is Cross Keys, at the center of Turner’s meandering path across the countryside. It was not a town – there were none in those days – save for Jerusalem, the county seat about eight miles away.
This is what is left of the Richard Porter house, where a young enslaved girl warned the family of Turner’s approaching band, and they were able to escape into the nearby woods. The chimney is visible at the center, while two vultures perch on the branches at the upper right. I came back the next day and photographed the ruin from a different angle. Across the road, behind an abandoned shack, I found the graves of Richard Porter and his wife.
My connection to the story of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion – one of my connections I should say – concerns this small house. Rebecca Vaughan, one of the victims of Turner’s rampage through the Virginia countryside, is my 3rd cousin six times removed. The house once stood abandoned in a field several miles from Courtland, previously called Jerusalem. The current property owner donated the house to the local historical society and it now sits awkwardly behind the now-closed Museum of Southampton History. It has been restored to a pristine condition, which seems, somehow, to hit a wrong note.
Mrs. Vaughan was the next place we visited—and after murdering the family here, I determined on starting for Jerusalem—Our number amounted now to fifty or sixty, all mounted and armed with guns, axes, swords and clubs… – Confessions of Nat Turner
A sign leaned up against one of the chimneys of the Vaughan House. “Its historical significance in our county history: The last house on the Insurrection Scene in which anyone was killed.”
In 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved man, was well-known by many in the county, black and white, for his religious preaching. He was literate in a rural community where many were not. He claimed to have visions and was called upon to lead an uprising against the slaveholders of Southampton County. They would gather reinforcements as they moved from farm to farm. Their goal was the county seat of Jerusalem. In an area where blacks outnumbered whites 3 to 2, success seemed plausible, if not, in the end, practical. The core group of Turner’s band met here at Cabin Pond at two in the morning and then struck the nearby Travis farm where Turner was enslaved.
Although few structures remain from 1831, when Nat Turner led his compatriots in a rampage against the slaveholders of Southampton County, the locations of the various farms are known. Whether freedom fighters or terrorists, their methods were brutal, and the relatiation by Whites was equally brutal. When Turner was in jail awaiting trial, he recounted the grisly details of his rebellion to Thomas Gray, a lawyer. Gray may have sensationalized the telling, but the facts remain undisputed.
Hark got a ladder and set it against the chimney, on which I ascended, and hoisting a window, entered and came down stairs, unbarred the door, and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which, armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. – Confessions of Nat Turner
BLACKHEAD SIGNPOST ROAD In Aug. 1831, following the revolt led by enslaved preacher Nat Turner, white residents and militias retaliated by murdering an indeterminable number of African Americans – some involved in the revolt, some not – in southamnpton County and elsewhere. At this intersection, where Turner’s force had turned toward Jerusalem (now Courtland), the severed head of a black man was displayed on a post and left to decay to terroize others and deter future uprisings against slavery. The beheaded man may have been Alfred, an enslaved blacksmith who, though not implicated in any revolt killings, was slain by militia near here. The name of this road was changed from Blackhead Signpost to Signpost in 2021.
I was told about an artist in Capron who painted scenes relating to the Nat Turner insurrection. I took a few pictures along the main street of the town including this one of the abandoned passenger train station. Behind me a few doors down I saw someone in his front yard and asked if he knew of a well-known artist in Capron. He said he lives right here next door. I did something I rarely do, I walked straight up and knocked on his door.
Mr. James Magee ushered me into his parlor and called for his wife and daughter to sit with us. He was a tall, thin, Black man – 94 years old – with a soft Virginia accent, and he asked why I had come, and how I had found him. We talked for about a half hour. He was disdainful of the tour I had taken retracing the path of Nat Turner and his compatriots, but eager to engage in conversation. He then showed me around his house full of antiques, two rooms of books, African-inspired art, his studio, and his paintings – large realistic paintings of historical events. They were painted with an astonishing vigor, powerful, disturbing, but beautiful.
Unknown title by James McGee
He made it clear from the moment I sat down that I was not to photograph anything. The image above, greatly enlarged, was the only one I could find on the internet. None of his paintings have been sold. None are in public collections. McGee said his wife and daughter would take care of his legacy. I told him about my relationship to Rebecca Vaughan, one of Turner’s victims. 3rd cousin six times removed sounds close I said, or not so close. Whatever the case, Rick Francis told me on the tour bus that I was the closest relative to Vaughan he had yet encountered.
McGee was not convinced that the Southampton County Historic Society had the real Rebecca Vaughan house, but I couldn’t see any reason why they would make something up like that. It was evident that McGee was beginning to wrap up our visit. He told me that he would show me the upstairs of his house when I made my next visit, which I took as an invitation to return. He then reached for the knob of a battered door that was hinged to the wall but did not open or close on an actual doorway. It merely swung on the wall. McGee looked at me with a penetrating stare and exclaimed dramatically, “This is the door of the Rebecca Vaughan house!
I ran away from Virginia when I was 20 or so with dreams of making it in New York. But I wasn’t fleeing the state as much as I was trying to free myself from a sense of darkness that cloaked my family’s past, a past that was essentially a black hole. No grandparents on either side of the family. They had died young, at least on my father’s side. My mother did actually run away when she was 16, and as a result, I had no contact with her side of the family. As I grew older I lost contact with most of my relatives, and those that I knew began to die off. I remained haunted, however, by the landscape of Isle of Wight and Southampton Counties – the southside of the James River – a mental and physical topography both alien and familiar.
In New York, I made photographs and wrote songs, splitting my time as best I could between two demanding pursuits. One day a song emerged effortlessly as if from the ether. “I spoke my name out loud/It floated like a cloud/not knowing that I was freed/I quivered like a reed/whispering my name/down below the James.” I was, it seems, expressing a desire for liberation from an unseen past, but I also knew instinctively that this was a song about slavery and the sins of my ancestors. “What smoke-thin ghost is wont, among these tin roof haunts, endless trains of coal, pass by the old swimming hole, my history and shame, down below the James.” It was the first song I ever recorded and appeared in the Fast Folk Musical Magazine in 1981.
Despite this bolt out of the blue that hinted, unconsciously, a connection to the infamous Nat Turner insurrection, I did not pursue it, and in those days, there were few ways to trace family history short of going to local courthouses and libraries and doing painstaking research. I was familiar with the Turner story having read William Styron’s “Confessions of Nat Turner” when in high school. The book made a lasting impression on me, and I related to Styron himself, who had left Virginia for New York City and a literary career. Moreover, I was aware that my uncle’s hog trucking business was located in Courtland, Virginia, the Southampton County seat, and originally called Jerusalem. Capturing Jerusalem was undoubtedly the proximate goal of Nat Turner as he led his band of rebels from farm to farm across the county. My father, who never said much about his upbringing in Walters, Virginia – located about 15 miles from Courtland – but he told me once that he remembers as a child waking one night to the terrifying sight of a cross aflame in the yard of his house. He could not explain why or whether the Roses were being targeted by the KKK. It remains a mystery.
Trajan Doyle house taken by William Sidney Drewry
During the Covid pandemic of 2020 I began researching my family roots online. I quickly discovered that my mother’s side of the family had come to Virginia from Mississippi and that my great, great, great, grandfather had been killed in the Battle of Vicksburg fighting on the side of the South. On my father’s side, however, the trail back in time was more difficult, as the genealogy work done by others only took me so far. So, I began the slow process of tracking down documents and making connections on my own. A few generations back, I followed the trail to the Doyals of Southampton County. My 3rd great-grandfather was Richard Doyal.
We again divided, part going to Mr. Richard Porter’s, and from thence to Nathaniel Francis’, the others to Mr. Howell Harris’, and Mr. T. Doyles. On my reaching Mr. Porter’s, he had escaped with his family. I understood there, that the alarm had already spread, and I immediately returned to bring up those sent to Mr. Doyles, and Mr. Howell Harris’; the party I left going on to Mr. Francis’, having told them I would join them in that neighborhood. I met these sent to Mr. Doyles’ and Mr. Harris’ returning, having met Mr. Doyle on the road and killed him…
This is central Amsterdam, the canal belt, “grachtengordel” in Dutch, still functional despite the intimacy of the streets and architecture. Fashionable (gentrified), full of shops, people on foot, on bikes, and a Tesla quietly slithering through. The composition echoes the great Gustave Caillebotte street scene of Paris in the Art Institute of Chicago. Paris is, of course, different in scale, and the painting achieves a geometric orderliness that the photo does not. But both images convey a simultaneous sense of modernity and timelessness.
At the end of the F train, I made my way a few blocks north to the boyhood home of Donald Trump, former president of the United States. On a street lined with tidy Tudor bungalows, the yard in front was choked with weeds, and a sign said, “Do not remove kittens from the property.” A cat with piercing green eyes sat next to the mailbox, red flag up. As I walked away, the cat followed, and stayed with me for several blocks, disappearing, and then popping up again in front of me.
This is an image from my ongoing series “Last Stop,” documenting the neighborhoods at the ends of all the subways lines in New York City. While many of the lines terminate in far-flung extremities of the city, a number of them end in Manhattan, like this one, the last stop of the L train at Eighth Avenue near the Meatpacking District.
One of the basic facts of life when photographing New York is the ubiquitous, and powerful, presence of the street grid. You fight it at your peril as you chase down the sunlight between the tenements and towers.
If I never have a cent I’ll be rich as Rockefeller Gold dust at my feet On the sunny side of the street – Dorothy Fields
The streets of Manhattan are famously straight, and they all recede to the horizon in forced monotony, a tyranny of perspective that must be accepted. Resistance is futile, though one looks for breaks in the street wall, or takes refuge in parks that are few and far between. But there is always action on the corner where streets converge, where pedestrians intermingle and collide, where right angles interrupt the flatness of facades, and the world comes alive in three dimensions.
And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all They just stand back and let it all be – Bruce Springsteen
The L train from Brooklyn ends at Eighth Avenue where it intersects with the A, E, and C trains coming down from Harlem stretching out all the way to the beaches of the Rockaways. A dignified neo classical bank building now houses a CVS pharmacy with its slapdash red logo adorning a richly sculpted bronze clock beneath a beehive, a symbol of thrift, as industrious bees buzz around the clockface and pigeons perch above.
I’m shining like a new dime The downtown trains are full With all those Brooklyn girls They try so hard to break out of their little worlds – Tom Waits
I stood on the curb of a protected a bike lane, and centered my shot on the clock just above the subway entrance, and locked the composition onto the pilasters and columns of the bank. I made sure the poles supporting the traffic lights stood free of these architectural elements and pointed the camera slightly to the left to include the subway elevator structure. The stage set, I waited for the actors to emerge from the wings.
Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today And the streets are paved with passer-by And pigeons fly, and papers lie Waiting to blow away – Joni Mitchell
Secondarily, I was aware of the gaggle of people behind. A boy in blue with red shoes stopped briefly, a tall thin man separated from the crowd, and I could see that people were arrayed evenly across the frame. You have to trust your instincts. There is no time to analyze or second guess. Everything falls into place, as if you are in control, and chaos is ordered and tamed.
Don’t ever change, don’t ever worry Because I’m coming back home tomorrow To 14th Street Where I won’t hurry And where I’ll learn how to save Not just borrow – Rufus Wainwright
I saw the couple approaching arm-in-arm, an elderly woman in an overly long trench coat and someone younger, perhaps her daughter in a puffy winter jacket. They moved briskly toward the corner and the crowd swirled around them as if they were meant to be the focus of the scene. I made four frames concluding with the couple entering the crosswalk, the older woman gripping her cane tightly peering ahead over her reading glasses halfway down her nose. They held each other closely, striding forward, the daughter raised her hand to her face as if reacting to something her mother said.
It was a cloudy day when I took this picture. No shadows, no sharply slanted November light, no sunny side of the street. Every detail was equal like the composition itself, a multiplicity of visual anecdotes played out on an architectural set. The mother and daughter moving through and out of the frame, the elegantly poised man at center beneath the clock, the boy in red shoes who appears to be hamming for the camera (but is not), the blue jacketed man glancing at his phone, the woman carrying something fuzzy – maybe a dog – the people facing left waiting for the light to change, the transit worker in uniform lost in thought, the bottle and can scavenger bent over his double-wide baby stroller, stolen or found, who knows. No one notices that I am standing directly in front of them, like a conductor before an orchestra, except for one man off to the right who looks directly at me.
We are all participants in this scene, in the dynamic of urban drama played out on the street. But were everyone to walk away, were the human figures to be erased, the urban landscape and architecture would remain, which is where this photograph begins and ends.
A concrete jungle where dreams are made of There’s nothing you can’t do. Now you’re in New York These streets will make you feel brand new Big lights will inspire you. – Jay-Z
The tentative title of my current project is “Last Stop” – as in “Last Stop on this train. Everyone, please leave the train.” I am photographing the neighborhoods around the ends of each subway line in New York. I am not the first who has done this, apparently, but I have no doubt that I can bring an original approach to the subject, one based on years of photographing New York.
Many of the subway lines terminate far from Manhattan, while some actually end right in the heart of Downtown and Midtown Manhattan. The E train, for instance, ends at the World Trade Center and is accessible from the Oculus, the wing-like train hall designed by Santiago Calatrava. The A train goes to the island of Broad Channel in Jamaica Bay where one can take a spur to Rockaway Beach. The city feels remote – just visible against the sky – but we are very much within the boundaries of this vast city of 9 million souls.
There are multiple reasons for engaging in this project, but the strongest for me is a desire to portray New York City as a highly diverse, multi-centered metropolis, one that has expanded and grown far beyond Manhattan and the well-known neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Manhattan, while still a dynamic place, has become relatively more homogenous and more expensive, with little manufacturing and few of the distinct market districts like the historic Fulton Fish Market and Meatpacking District that once defined the fabric of city. Those areas are now entertainment and shopping destinations. Like most of the major cities of the world, New York City has become a tourist mecca and a staging platform for international brands.
Old Tree by Pamela Rosenkranz, alien, yet a symbol of nature in the heart of the urban landscape. Its branches evoke the arteries of the body – it pulses. Magenta/red, the opposite color of green, an emphatic visual punctuation mark surrounded by the vestiges of industrial New York now supplanted by the glass towers of Hudson Yards and the information economy. In the foreground, an odd collection of disks lie on the ground. There are several pristine, new forklifts, and three young women sit on the tailgate of a pickup truck. A portable restroom trailer has doors for male, female, and male/female. What is going on here?
I had the distinct honor last night to introduce Mitch Epstein as the recipient of the August Saint-Gaudens Award, which is given each year to a living Cooper Union school of art alum. The award ceremony was held in the Rose Auditorium (no relation, but somehow appropriate), in the new academic building on Third Avenue and Cooper Square.
Despite only graduating three years apart, this was the first time I had met Mitch. I have closely followed his career, however, and was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk about his work. My introductory remarks follow:
My name is Brian Rose from the Art class of ‘79. It is my pleasure to introduce the recipient of the 2023 Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award. Each year this award is given to a living alum of the School of Art for outstanding professional achievement and contribution in the arts. Tonight I am honored to introduce Mitch Epstein, Art class of 1976.
Mitch and I came out of a photography program that produced a number of influential art photographers and professionals. While at Cooper, Mitch studied with Gary Winogrand, Todd Papageorge, and Joel Meyerowitz, one of the pioneers of color photography.
He went on to a career of astonishing depth and breadth encompassing both still photography and film. He has produced 17 books, and his work has been collected by major museums around the world. Although he has made any number of iconic individual images, I know Mitch’s work especially well through his projects.
Biloxi, Mississippi – Mitch Epstein 2005
One such project, American Power, started out as an assignment to document a dying town in Ohio, its residents being bought out by an electric company that sought to expand its operation. That assignment led to an exploration of American society in relation to the production of energy and its impact on the landscape. I think, in particular, of a picture made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a superstorm portending more such extreme weather due to global warming. The image is heartbreaking, yet exquisite in its delicacy.
Family Business is more than a photography project. It incorporates stills, film, and interviews and tells the story of the demise of Mitch’s father’s business in the fading industrial city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The project addresses the wrenching changes occurring in blue collar communities across the country, but it is also a look into Mitch’s own identity. In the short film “Dad,” Mitch’s father struggles to deal with tenants in the aftermath of a fire in a building he owns. In a confrontation with his property manager, he repeats the phrase, “I’ve been doing this for 59 years.” In Family Business, Mitch is not offering easy solace or platitudes, but he is insisting, to echo Arthur Miller, “he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”
Mitch Epstein receiving the August Saint-Gaudens Award from Ciera Lowe
These are but two projects of many. Mitch’s career and life have taken him to India, Vietnam, Europe, and all across the United States, but some of my favorite photographs of Mitch’s have been made right here in New York City where he lives. In recent years he has turned to making black and white images of rocks, clouds, and trees. Elemental things, hard and soft, tactile and ephemeral, like life itself.
The shoreline of the Lower East Side was once an irregular geography of creeks and inlets and marshland. That natural landscape was transformed into a sawtoothed row of docks with adjacent warehouses, factories, power plants, and tenement housing. Then Robert Moses, master planner, tore it all down and extended Manhattan onto landfill in the East River. Housing projects replaced the tenements, and a highway was constructed between them and a strip of parkland along the river.
And then came Hurricane Sandy pushing water into New York Harbor and flooding this part of the Lower East Side. The water reached a transformer of the massive Con Edison powerplant, a vestige of the old industrial landscape of Manhattan, and an electrical arc took out the plant, plunging much of Lower Manhattan into darkness.
The city is now rebuilding East River Park, raising its profile against the ever-rising sea level caused by global warming. I took this picture from a pedestrian walkway bridging the FDR Drive, my shadow-self portrait at the lower right.
Looking forward by looking back to May 24, 1983, the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. After photographing the Lower East Side, I was only then attempting to get started as a professional photographer. The Rouse Company, the developer of the South Street Seaport, hired me to document some of their ongoing construction work, which led to my first published assignment.
Because of my relationship with Rouse, I was able to secure a prime spot to photograph the fireworks show for the centennial celebration. There were dozens of other photographers perched along the decaying waterfront with their SLRs, motor drives, and telephoto lenses. I was down on a sandy strip of beach – the tide must have been out – with my 4×5 field camera and wide-angle lens, juggling with film holders in the approaching darkness.
I had no idea how to go about photographing fireworks. I was just winging it. Knowing I only had about ten sheets of film to work with, I opened up the lens all the way, making sure I was focused on infinity, and tried a series of time exposures. One second, 2 seconds, 8 seconds, 15 seconds. About half of them were washed out and unusable, but I nailed it on the image above, a single projectile fired from a barge below the bridge, bursting into a perfect shower of fire.
My contact at the Rouse Company put me in touch with the editor of the AIA Journal, Donald Canty, who asked if I could show him my portfolio. No websites in those days – I had to go to his office. The magazine was headquartered in Washington, D.C., so I took a train down and met with Canty not far from the White House, as I recall.
The magazine was looking for a photographer to shoot the Seaport. The problem, however, was that I had no portfolio other than my pictures of the Lower East Side, which were not seamless images of sleek new buildings, but gritty documents of the streets and architecture of a neighborhood and a city caught at the cusp between decline and rebirth. The images, made in color with a view camera, depicted reality in stark and vivid detail, unlike the grainy black and whites usually associated with the Lower East Side. Don Canty looked at the 11×14 prints I had brought with me, which included my Brooklyn Bridge fireworks picture, and he told me right then and there that he would hire me.
He ran the bridge image as a double-page spread in the magazine a few months later, and I went on to do numerous assignments for Canty in the 1980s.
I just saw the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at Gagosian on West 24th Street in Chelsea, and I used the opportunity to bring my camera and add to my ongoing project photographing the High Line and its surroundings. Kiefer has long figured into my way of thinking about landscape and architecture. I became aware of his work in the 1980s, and his straw paintings, in particular, were on my mind as I began photographing the landscape of the Iron Curtain.
Landscapes of all sorts – urban, rural, and wild – are conveyors of history and bearers of cultural clues, evidence of our existence. The landscape of Europe is fraught with the weight of centuries of war and violence, and architecture, the constructed embodiment of civilization, religious and secular, preserves history in its presence on the landscape. Moreover, we project our knowledge of this past, however fragmentary or distorted, onto the landscapes and structures of human habitation.
Kiefer’s work, as I see it, occupies this territory – the layered complexity of landscape and memory and his paintings do so both as image and as visceral experience in the way he incorporates materials – straw, lead, gold leaf – into his thickly impasto-ed surfaces. These are the elements of alchemy and material transformation, and one surmises that Kiefer strives to transmogrify the baseness of humanity into enlightenment, but we remain imprisoned in the soil, and gaze upon the horrors writ upon the landscape and contained in the utilitarian logic of Nazi architecture. Kiefer also makes use of mythology and religion, the allegorical underpinnings of society, and indeed, this exhibition at Gagosian is entitled “Exodus.”
As a photographer, I work strictly with images. They are not 3-dimensional, there is no materiality, no impasto. Nor do I delve into the mystical as Kiefer does. But I do explore the palimpsest of history and memory, and like Kiefer I am not afraid of taking on big subjects, iconic structures, and places invested with cultural and spiritual meaning. Kiefer goes way too far for me. His grandiose symphonic expressions push over the edge, but they are undeniably powerful, and are among the great works of our time.
Things got so bad in the 1980s that the city began offering buildings to developers for $1. Of course, the offer came with conditions, but imagine anything in New York going for a dollar today. The Cooper Square Committee, a housing organization led by the charismatic activist Frances Goldin opposed the giveaway of the Cube Building, a crumbling square-shaped tenement with a collapsed roof at the corner of Second Avenue and East 1st Street. I was a volunteer member of the steering committee of Cooper Square, located on East 4th Street, just a few blocks away. It was 1985, a time of much turmoil on the Lower East Side. AIDS cases were rapidly exploding and discarded crack vials on the street signaled a new and disturbing trend.
We sent angry letters to politicians and held demonstrations protesting the pending sale of the Cube Building, but I was convinced we would fail without a more practical solution. Paradoxically, while derelict buildings were being sold off, the city faced a mounting crisis of homeless families, women with children, not the usual “Bowery bums” or the single individuals who lived in SRO hotels. Responding to political pressure, New York state established a capital program for projects designed to house homeless families. As soon as I heard about the state program, I seized upon the idea of using it to rehabilitate the Cube Building for homeless families. As I recall, it took some doing to convince others that going for the money might be a stronger play than carrying signs in the street.
And there was another little problem. We had no standing as an independent nonprofit to apply for the money. We did not have, in city government parlance, site control. The head of HPD (Housing Preservation and Development), Tony Gliedman, an Ed Koch appointee, was not going to give it to us, but there was a young deputy commissioner, Joe Shuldiner, who met with us, listened to our pitch, and granted us a very narrow window of a few weeks to apply to the state for funding. He may have stepped a little out of line at HPD – perhaps – but he definitely stepped up for us in a big way.
We put together a budget for the Cube Building that was entirely smoke and mirrors. It depended on a million dollars of state money, a vague amount of city participation, and several hundred thousand dollar’s worth of sweat equity. The idea was that the tenants selected for the project would perform construction tasks to round out the financing of the renovation. We knew, of course, that this was ludicrously unrealistic.
When I got involved with the Cooper Square Committee, I was well aware of its role under Frances Goldin’s leadership in stopping Robert Moses from demolishing much of the East Village to build public housing, and I knew that she was instrumental in preventing Moses from running an expressway across Lower Manhattan. So, I had read “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s epic portrayal of the rise and fall of Robert Moses, and learned a lot about how things work in this city. There was one paragraph that stuck with me:
Misleading and underestimating, in fact, might be the only way to get a project started. . . . Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you had spent it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. . . . Once a Legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it.
I knew that if we could get the state to give us money to do the Cube Building, the rest of it would fall into place. “You don’t give money back once you’ve got it,” I remember saying. And so, we packaged a largely fictitious budget proposal and applied for the state money. What I did not fully understand at the time was that Frances Goldin had friends in the agency we were applying to, and our chances of success were better than I knew. That said, I do not believe she had any idea how far out on a limb our proposal actually was. Accordingly, she was calm and confident when we met with state officers in the World Trade Center to outline our proposal. I, on the other hand, was in total panic and feeling physically ill.
The meeting turned out to be a piece of cake – they never asked us to justify our numbers. They had already decided to award us a grant of $1.2 million for the rehabilitation of the Cube Building. We all shook hands with broad grins on our faces, and I realized, somewhat to my surprise, that these supposedly faceless bureaucrats who worked in a fluorescent-lit office in the World Trade Center were as excited as we were to be part of something positive, maybe even something great.
Unfortunately for me, the butterflies I had come to the meeting with had developed into a full-blown bout of food poisoning, and I fled the meeting by myself, grabbing a cab in front of the Vista Hotel, urging the driver to get me back to East 4th Street as quickly as possible. Heading uptown, I couldn’t suppress the nausea any longer, threw some money at the driver, and stumbled out on the corner of Houston and Bowery, vomiting on the street amidst a scattering of disheveled men sprawled on the pavement. The only good thing I can say about the situation is that no one noticed.
And things did fall into place. The city was forced to accept that we had secured the money to start the project, and they, grudgingly chipped in the rest of what ballooned into a $2 million outlay, due in part to the shady low-bid contractor we were forced to work with. There was, of course, no sweat equity component unless you count the untold hours we put into the proposal and the untold hours we put into supervising the construction and selecting the tenants for what was the nation’s first nonprofit coop for homeless families. Val Orselli, director of Cooper Square, and Ann Ostrander, a recent Columbia graduate on our staff, did the lion’s share of the work.
Christmas greeting from Ann Ostrander, Cooper Square staff, 1985
Two years later in 1987, at the dedication of the building held on the sidewalk on Second Avenue, I was pleased to see Joe Shuldiner, who had moved to a job with the New York City Housing Authority. He later became director of the housing authority of Los Angeles, and then Chicago. I said to him, somewhat apologetically, that I was sorry the project ended up costing the city so much more than we had initially proposed. His reply was, forget about it; you got it done; these people have a place to live. Forty-five years later, the Cube Building remains a low-income coop.
In the late 70s I lived in a tiny tenement apartment on East 4th Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue, with a toilet in the hall and a bathtub in the kitchen. While in art school at nearby Cooper Union, my bedroom doubled as a darkroom for black and white printing, and the living room walls were covered with paintings and photographs. Living in the East Village, I quickly found a community of artists and songwriters. While CBGB, the punk rock Valhalla, was just around the corner, I was hanging with musicians who favored acoustic guitars. When a group of us began recording the Fast Folk Musical Magazine, a monthly album of songs with a printed insert, the typing and paste-up were done in my apartment. The typewriter we used was an IBM Selectric, a brilliant machine with interchangeable type balls. We borrowed it from Sherwood Ross, one of our songwriting buddies, who always seemed a bit goofy to me – he had a song called “I Sliced Pastrami for the CIA and found God” – but unknown to us at the time, he was, in fact,the Sherwood Ross, a legendary journalist and civil rights hero. He served as publicist for James Meredith, who was shot while leading a march for voting rights in Mississippi.
Wikipedia: James, he’s got a gun!” Ross was quoted as saying in his eye-witness account of the shooting that was published on the front page of the Washington Star and other major newspapers. Photos of Meredith writhing in agony appeared in newspapers around the world. One such photo by the Associated Press garnered the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. These images – along with Ross’ appearance the following day on NBC’s “Today Show” calling for reinforcements – prompted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and other civil rights leaders to rally to Mississippi to continue in Meredith’s footsteps.
Given all the creative ventures vying for space in my cozy apartment on 4th Street, I did very little cooking, and I spent a great deal of time in nearby restaurants and cafes reading a newspaper, jotting down lyrics or writing letters, keeping a journal. It was an analog world then, of course, and to me, the center of that pre-digital world rotated around Gem Spa, a newsstand at the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. Gem Spa always had the late edition of the Times, and near the cash register, an array of pricey art and architecture magazines, which I furtively leafed through, hoping to avoid the gaze of the cashier who would bark, “This is not a library!” should one linger too long on an open page. Gem Spa also was known for its chocolate egg cream, an elixir frothed up in actual glasses in a ritual transubstantiation of Fox’s U-Bet syrup, milk, and seltzer. You drank it right there – inside, amidst the magazines – or outside, where your egg cream was handed to you through a hole-in-the-wall window at the front of the shop.
In 1977, when I first moved to East 4th Street, my eating-out options were somewhat limited. There were cheap Indian restaurants on 6th Street, Bamboo House for Chinese on 7th, and the B&H Dairy between 7th and St. Mark’s. Dave, who worked behind the counter at B&H made the best omelets in the world, as far as I was concerned, but he was one cantankerous old dude. One day while seated at the counter, I failed to order fast enough for Dave, and he grabbed me by both ears and growled, “I can’t hear you!” Another day, I made the unfortunate choice of ordering a Coke to go with my bowl of mushroom barley soup. Dave shamed me in front of the entire restaurant – “Who orders a Coke with soup?” No one came to my defense. They all kept their heads down to avoid the wrath of Dave, the East Village version of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi.
My restaurant options greatly improved when Kiev opened in 1978, a round-the-clock Ukrainian diner with pierogis, kielbasa, challah bread French toast, and unlimited lousy coffee. It teamed up with nearby Veselka as twin meccas of Ukrainian soul food. Kiev was an immediate hit with the entire neighborhood, and it bustled at all hours. It was blindingly bright, with banks of fluorescent tubes casting an unflattering greenish glow on the pale denizens of the East Village night. I sat at a table next to the Ramones one night at 4 A.M. looking so much like themselves in torn jeans, leather jackets, and long shaggy hair that I couldn’t help but think they were the Ramones dressed up to look like the Ramones. One night I sat across from John Malkovich, who I greatly admired as an actor, but rather than talking about the theater, he was blathering on to a companion about a house he had visited in the Hamptons. Oh well, I thought, we’re definitely not in the Hamptons here.
Closest to me on the corner of East 5th and Second Avenue was Binibon, a cheap hole-in-the-wall cafe with a bohemian vibe and edible food. The waiters and waitresses were young aspiring actors and artists like me, and it was a great place to sip coffee and read the paper. I was in there at least several times a week. They say that everyone from William Burroughs to Jean-Michel Basquiat ate there, but I don’t remember ever seeing anyone I recognized.
One morning, I arrived at my usual 8-ish hour, and while the place was clearly open, there were unusually few patrons. Something was wrong. Something terribly wrong. It’s been so long since then that I can’t quite describe the atmosphere, but after a brief bite to eat, I knew I had to get out of there right away. Someone behind the counter said something about a murder, that someone had been stabbed in the street outside, but there were no uniformed police in evidence – no NYPD detectives in cheap suits – and no crime scene tape or chalked outline of a body. It was, so it seemed, just another routine murder on the Lower East Side. That evening I watched the CBS News, and Dan Rather, who had just taken over for the legendary anchor Walter Cronkite, to my astonishment, reported the details of what turned out to be a decidedly un-routine murder on the Lower East Side.
Jack Abbott, a convicted violent felon, was paroled from a maximum security prison in Utah with the help of author Norman Mailer. Abbott’s prison memoir “In the Belly of the Beast,” had come to Mailer’s attention, and he believed that Abbott, a victim of a traumatic upbringing, deserved a chance at redemption. Abbott’s book was published, and after he was released, he came to New York to work as a researcher for Mailer and stayed at a halfway house on East 3rd Street run by the Salvation Army. At that time, East 3rd also housed a large shelter for the homeless, and the sidewalks were littered with derelict men. Abbot, after years of prison life, was now the toast of the town, giving interviews and doing television appearances while simultaneously living amongst the dregs of society just off the Bowery.
The New York Times: At 5 A.M. on July 18, Mr. Abbott was eating in the all-night Binibon Restaurant at Second Avenue and East Fifth Street, three blocks from the halfway house. When a 22-year-old part-time waiter refused him permission to use a toilet, saying it was restricted to employees, Mr. Abbott apparently asked him to step outside. Within a minute the waiter, who had recently married and had a promising career as an actor, was dead of a single knife wound to the heart, and Mr. Abbott had fled.
I, unwittingly, had arrived at Binibon that morning just a few hours after the murder walking into a palpable maelstrom of horror. It was too late for the Times to retract their review of Abbott’s newly published book already in print for the Sunday Edition. “His prose is most penetrating, most knife-like, when anger is its occasion. How, I wonder, shall this talent serve Abbott now that he is free?” Binibon was shuttered shortly after the murder. Abbott was apprehended in Louisiana, convicted of manslaughter, and hanged himself in prison in 2002.
November 9, 1980. I stumbled out around 8 A.M. as usual and headed to Gem Spa for the paper. As I approached the newsstand, I was staggered on my feet by a screaming New York Post headline: “John Lennon Shot Dead.” The Times confirmed the murder in the less emphatic style of the Gray Lady with a headline down the page to the left above a photograph of Yoko Ono and music mogul David Geffen, distraught. The lead headline at the top of the page warned of a possible Soviet invasion of Poland. My God! Some things never change. Four decades later, I am still traumatized by that moment and the loss of one of my heroes – I had just seen John and Yoko walking through Central Park that summer.
Living in New York, one inevitably catches glimpses of celebrities – artists, actors, musicians – as a matter of course. They are neighbors, not just mythic icons of popular culture. Walking up Fifth Avenue years ago I collided rather violently with the late senator Patrick Moynihan, who had just emerged unexpectedly from a cab at the curb. Dusting ourselves off, we made brief eye contact, quickly assessing that nothing untoward had happened. It was just a random crossing of paths, literally. In New York, the nexus of accident and fate is an ever present reality, tightly woven like the grid of the streets.
My next-door neighbor, Manny, in 69 East 4th Street was getting weirder and weirder, wearing dark glasses day and night, and a steady stream of visitors came up the tenement stairs and knocked on his door, just inches from mine. Sometimes there were loud voices and heated arguments, but whenever I ran into Manny in the hall, he was friendly, relaxed and casual, if a little distant. I was suspicious of what he was doing, but I didn’t give it that much thought. One night there were, again, loud voices, followed by the sound of a struggle, furniture crashing, shouts of no! no! no! And then pop – pop – pop. Gunfire, three times. I heard footsteps fleeing down the stairs and the click of the deadbolt lock from inside my neighbor’s door. I called 911.
The police arrived a short time later, randomly buzzing apartments from the vestibule downstairs to get access to the building. After several minutes of silence, I cracked open my door and peered out. The cops were creeping forward in the narrow hallway, their guns drawn, barrels pointed in my direction. They hissed at me to get back inside. I pointed to my neighbor’s door and said “I think he’s still in there.” The door was locked from the inside, and the cops had to break it down. The EMS carried him down on a stretcher, blood pouring out of wounds in his torso. It appeared he was still alive. Weeks went by and the apartment remained empty, and Manny, well, he never came back.
