The Baby Beat Photographer
June 23, 2008In the summer of 1962 I took a course in photography at San Francisco State from Jack Welpott, a modernist photographer of renown. He said my stuff was sentimental.
His words cut like a knife. Me? Sentimental? No way! I was bad as they come. Look at this guy! That’s me, the very summer of my mortal wound. I knew the streets. I knew grifters. And I knew what sentimental meant. It meant cheap emotion manufactured to give the viewer a cheap thrill. Oh, look at the cute little kitten and the big dog is carrying it so gently. Isn’t that sweet? Pictures like that were sentimental and I had nothing to do with sentimentality.
Could I help it if every time I looked through my viewfinder there was a sad-eyed vulnerable waif looking lost and forlorn?
I wasn’t taking pictures for a cheap thrill. I was taking pictures of my friends, the girl variety to be exact. That’s how they looked. So beautiful my heart ached and I wanted to give them to the world forever. Which I now do.
I wasn’t sentimental like that Walter Keane, the laughing stock of the baby beatnik world. He and his wife ran an art gallery on Broadway above a topless bar, and sold his sadeyed waifs with huge eyes to tipsy tourists who stood in line to see.
Bleaah! Sickening! Me and Linda Lovely and Sheila Clark and Sneaky Pete and all my way out friends laughed cynically as we passed the Keane-bound crowds on our way to an important meeting standing outside the Jazz Workshop to listen to John Coltrane because they wouldn’t let us through the door. Tourists! My pictures were nothing like his paintings.
Oh why, ye gods? I go forth to capture the true nature of the human heart, and, in particular the true heart of my various girl friends and what do I get? Your stuff is sentimental! By a big time modernist like Jack Welpott who must know. I was crushed.
Even when I went forth to shoot approved modernist subjects like severe nudes with no heads, weathered barns in the gold rush country or Edward Weston barnacled rocks looming out of Pacific tidepools, I got ruined castles, I got broken dreams, I got enchanted princesses in long gowns and wimples sleepwalking though haunted landscapes.
Botheration! I give up! I’m a stoopid romantic! I’d better not tell anybody.
Of course what I didn’t know is that the modernist fever was breaking. Within a couple years young barbarians would be ransacking junk stores looking for Maxfield Parrish prints, and new poster art would be created by artists who cut their teeth flame-painting ‘49 Mercs. And not a minute too soon for me. Eat your heart out, Jack Welpott.
Man, these pictures are incredible, dad. How come I’ve never seen most of them before?
If one simply droops the judgment (someone else’s) behind the definition of “sentiment”, it’s not so bad. An emotional thought, feelings bound up with some ideal, tender; then I for one would embrace it!
The portraits are beautiful. I especially found the one of the girl sitting on the steps drawing me in. It’s isolated and architectural. I thought the garden wall embellished with urns quite haunting. But then I am drawn to old ruins and the solitude of cemeteries.
Did you stop photographing because of his critique?
It’s so unfortunate that the instructor threw you off with his unacceptable judgment of your vision.
During those years, I also took many beautiful portraits of my friends. We were beautiful weren’t we? I took them for myself. No one could have convinced me that they are anything but wonderful. They are the first thing I grab, when threatened by fire, which has ocured more than once.
Thanks, Silky. Someday I’ll write about why I didn’t continue with photography. I wish I had and I wish I had photographed Sheila Clark and Silky James and Leslie Hipshman-Van Gelder and all the other maidens who delight these pages and my memory. Over and over.
By the way, I MUST see your photographs. Hand ‘em over right now!
These are indeed very beautiful pictures, I also wish you had taken more over the years- what an eye you have. However, personally, I find myself more drawn to the cat in the wall picture than the urn. I like how it looks like he is mosying on over to see if there is perchance a can of tuna in that bag over by the rock- or maybe he is stalking a mouse- whichever,it is very typically cat. Wonderful.
oh that above cooment was me- I didn’t expect it to publish without my name.
comment, that is
I never would have thought that Sheila posed for Walter Keane!!! But the proof’s right there on the Pondering Pig’s blog! (I hope he paid her the BIG bucks!) Personally, I like your portrait of her much better. It’s the real stuff.
Me too. I think the Pig should have pursued a career in the visual arts. Oh, yeah. I guess he did.
Beautiful images for sure.
These are really, really good. Not hokey, at all. Modernist, blah. So you happen to respect women rather than make their nude bodies into objects - violins, planters, and headless torsos.
I hope you still take photos like these. Rather than sentimental, I find them soulful.