The Baby Beat Photographer

In 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.

Nitsa Pays A Call

A wintry fog wrapped itself around the Pigsty as Patrushka and the Pondering Pig returned from their travels seeking a new home. Wearily Pig climbed down from the gypsy cart, unhitched Fred, their trusty pony, and clomped to the front door. A note was pinned to it.

“Eh, what’s this then?” (Sometimes Pig affects the accent of a Midlands coal miner when he thinks no one can hear) “Dunna see why some people have to leave notes when we’re tired and wants our soup” He stopped as the words swam into focus.

“Patrushka, Patrushka – Nitsa has come to call! And no one was here to give her tea.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well, Pig – there’s nothing in the house but cabbages. You don’t offer a princess photographer cabbages.”

Cardinals popped out of the bushes screeching for suet in the bird feeder, but neither the Pondering Pig nor his beautiful companion, also a photographer of some note, paid any attention.

How many questions they longed to ask Nitsa. Perhaps they could have asked them, and not just sat politely with teacups rattling on their laps, inquiring about the weather at the palace.

Questions like:

How does Nitsa sign each photo so neatly in tiny little calligraphy? Could she show us how?

Why does she leave a little black edge around every photo? Is it to show she didn’t crop it – like Diane Arbus used to do? Or just to look neat?

But, most importantly – where do you buy that special lens that sees behind the apparentness of things to reveal their archetypes, stereotypes and pure humanized essence?

Nitsa’s pictures resonate with this trembling peek behind the curtain of what is. Like that photo “Open 24 Hours”. Taken this year yet showing the way the world looked in 1955. Or “The Man in the Hat” – Somehow Nitsa took that picture in 1924. Does she really have a lens that sees into other times?

Patrushka and the Pig were just hoping she would drop by one day when the cabbages has been boiled up into a wholesome soup fit for a tired traveler into the mystery of things.

“Well, Old Ponderer, perhaps she’ll drop by again one day.”, Said Patrushka. “Meanwhile, flip on the computer. Let’s download these images and have a look at what I’ve been up to out in Penn’s Woods…”

You can view Nitsa’s work at The Streets Are Alive http://blog.nonphotography.com/index.php

In The Mist

What a mist settled down over the coast yesterday.
We went for a walk and Patrushka brought her camera.