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♪ Say where did I see this guy ♪
♪ In Red River ♪
♪ Or A Place In The Sun ♪
♪ Maybe The Misfits ♪
♪ Or From Here To Eternity ♪
♪ And everybody say is he all right ♪
♪ And everybody say what's he like ♪
♪ And everybody say he sure looks funny ♪
♪ That's Montgomery Clift honey ♪
♪ New York New York 42nd Street ♪
♪ Hustlers rustle and pimps pimp the beat ♪
♪ Monty Clift is recognized at dawn ♪
♪ He ain't got no shoes and his clothes are torn ♪
♪ And everybody say is he all right ♪
♪ And everybody say what's he like ♪
♪ And everybody say he sure look funny ♪
♪ That's that Montgomery Clift honey ♪
Because I started out there in the street
or wherever I was taking pictures,
I carried that through my whole body of work, really.
There's something in my brain
that tells me the moment to shoot.
Something inside clicks.
And you're not looking through the camera all the time,
so you lift the camera and shoot.
It is extremely spontaneous.
If I have color film, I see everything in color.
If I have black and white,
I see everything in black and white.
And after years of doing it and being faster at doing it,
it became very intuitive,
and it was arranging chaos in a certain way,
because I was very conscious of composition.
The frame was very important to me.
What was really fun in the world of analog
as opposed to digital photography
was finding out later what made me click the shutter.
"Oh, yeah, that's what made me do it."
And that would appear in the dark room.
And I'm glad to have done it that way,
because it was much more work, but it was much more fun.
I got this apartment with two friends,
if you can believe it, given the size.
But it was summer of '66, and it was $109.
There was a bed in that room, which is my kitchen dark room.
There was a bed over here.
And that was always my bed.
I had been at Pratt for two years,
and I got a job working for a photographer.
He was a fashion photographer.
He was just starting out in New York, Alberto Rizzo,
and he became actually quite famous.
I knew nothing about photography at all.
I didn't know what a strobe was,
and I'd never worked in a dark room.
But somehow we hit it off,
because we seemed to like all the same American things,
movies mostly.
I learned on the job, and I bought my first camera
and just went out into the street, taking pictures.
Then I started using a flash.
Anyway, I just fell in love
with everything about photography
and never went back to Pratt.
So I stayed with him for two years,
and by the end of that summer,
my buddies moved out, and I kept the place.
Well this is a photo that I made
with my first camera, from my first roll of film,
which is April 1968.
Came from Coney Island.
Do you remember taking the photo?
I do.
There are many, many
that I have no memory at all of taking,
but I do remember that, because I was hoping I got it,
and I got what I wanted, yeah.
'69 was an amazing year.
I hitchhiked across the country for several months,
just picking up pictures everywhere I went.
I bulk loaded film.
Otherwise it would've been way too expensive
to shoot the way I shot.
Slept by the side of the road.
It wasn't anywhere near as terrifying
as it would be now to hitchhike, serial killer wise.
And I was at a rock and roll festival in Texas,
Texas Pop Festival,
with my girlfriend as it turned out.
And I went to a stationary store
and forged a press pass for a magazine called Show Magazine,
which I knew nobody would ever check.
And so I sat up front all three days
of this rock and roll festival.
So I got closeups of BB King,
and Janice Joplin,
Johnny Winter.
So when I came back from this trip,
I had hundreds of rolls of film
and needed to process everything,
'cause I didn't trust doing it on the road.
So I had to build a darkroom in the kitchen.
There was a rock and roll paper called Crawdaddy,
and I used to see it around,
and I went over there with the pictures I took
from that rock and roll festival,
and they hired me as a staff photographer,
so that was my first job.
Crawdaddy was a quarter fold newspaper,
like Rolling Stone when it first started.
It was basically about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
The whole place was filled with characters.
Richard Meltzer was one of the main writers there.
A lot of musicians would stay
right across the street, at the Albert Hotel.
In those days it was either the Albert or the Chelsea.
I took a lot of pictures in hotel rooms.
It was a lot of fun, because I went to Fillmore all the time
and hung out backstage and wherever.
I think I developed a point of view while I was there.
A lot of it was getting past the machine of the camera,
which I always say is kind of the most important thing.
Then I became a better printer.
All the things that you have to do when you're starting out.
I met my grandmother for the first time
when I was eight years old.
I flew by myself on a TWA plane to Los Angeles.
She greeted me at the airport
and immediately told me what we were gonna do.
We were gonna have a fantastic time.
We were going to go to Disneyland on the opening day,
which we did.
This is 1955.
Then she decided at a certain point to move to New York.
I would come in and see her as often as I could,
because she would show me all the cool things of New York.
She took me to "Psycho" on the opening day.
She knew what I liked.
She was fluent in Spanish,
but we would go to Bunuel movies to brush up on her Spanish,
and that's how I learned about Bunuel.
We went to a place called Hubert's Museum,
which had game machines on the top floor.
And then you would go downstairs,
and there'd be just all kinds of sideshow attractions.
She was sort of an Auntie Mame character to me.
In introducing me to the city,
she made the city an adventure for me
that never stopped being an adventure.
And I wanted to live an adventurous life in the city,
not knowing what you were gonna do from day to day.
At the age of 76, she decided to become an actress.
She was like that.
I said, "Well, great, I'll do a portfolio for you."
And she immediately got work,
because everyone found her so engaging.
She did print ads, commercials, soap operas.
I was working on a George Romero movie, doing stills,
when I heard that she was taken ill,
so I ran back and met her in the hospital,
and she died a few days later.
Harriet Sappington.
There was a period where I wasn't doing anything,
and so I got my only job outside of photography,
which was selling records at Bleecker Bob's record store.
His record store was right across the street
from the Bleecker Cinema.
He and I were friends, and he knew I wasn't doing anything,
and he asked me if I wanted to work there.
And so I was alternating
with David Johansen and Lenny Kaye,
who were also not really in bands yet.
And then I got hired by a newspaper called The Herald...
which had a brief life in New York.
It was a Sunday paper. It was huge.
It was designed by a brilliant designer
named Massimo Vignelli,
who designed an early version of the subway map.
And it won all kinds of design awards.
So they ran the pictures quite large.
And they asked me to do a little bit of everything.
A lot of portraits, a lot of news stories.
Patti Smith and I would do rock and roll interviews.
There was also a section called Inside,
which was partly about interior design,
but for me it was mostly about how people lived.
Once I made a picture
that I called "Mrs. Sills in Her Husband's Den."
Later on, the writer Veronica Geng,
who was my girlfriend at the time,
did a very funny spread for Harper's Magazine,
using that photo and including captions
that annotated the husband's belongings in that room.
The art director was George Delmerico.
We met very briefly at Pratt and hung out a bit,
but we became much closer friends working at the paper.
And then my friend, the poet Jim Brody,
was asked to edit the culture page.
He'd written at Crawdaddy while I was there.
That's how we met.
He was the one who brought on Patti Smith in early 1971.
Jim Brody is really a significant poet
in the Poetry Project milieu of the early '70s.
He's not the most well-known poet outside of that scene.
And so to find out that James and Jim Brody
sort of had this really great relationship,
it was really fascinating to me,
as somebody interested in that aspect
of downtown New York music,
which is very connected to the poetry community as well.
You know, around CBGBs and Max's,
of where these things really colluded.
And James was documenting all these figures
that you very rarely see any good photographs of.
I remember once Brody and I
visited Duane Allman at the Chelsea
the afternoon of the last concert at Fillmore East.
That was June '71.
I like artifacts.
And the Duane Allman picture is full of artifacts.
The tape recorder, the science fiction novel,
All the hands coming out of...
The can of beer, the joint, the...
Pack of Kools.
Is it Kools?
I think so.
That's right. Kools, Schlitz.
He's reading A.E. van Vogt.
Yeah.
Listening to the music and kind of...
and he just lit a cigarette.
He's nearly rapturous.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
That's what I thought.
He's like, "This is the life."
Nine times out of 10 in your photographs,
there's always this one aspect
that there's something else going on.
It's not just the subject.
There's Soft Machine sitting around in a hotel lobby,
and this woman who just has
absolutely nothing to do with them,
she just happens to be sitting there
With sunglasses.
With sunglasses on.
You put her in the photograph.
And that happens a lot,
where there's this other thing in there that just sort of
turns the story. - It's this awkward moment.
It's slightly awkward, but it's humorous.
It's great.
For one assignment, I went on set
for a Milos Forman film called "Taking Off."
This is the first time I've actually been on a set.
The scene was an audition scene.
♪ I was born ♪
Kathy Bates came and played guitar
♪ Full of angels and kings ♪
Carly Simon.
♪ So I'm gonna have another drag ♪
This is before they were well known.
And the camera would just rove around.
♪ And at the end ♪
Then they eventually came to right in front of me,
and I felt the camera on my face,
and it winds up being the close-up in the film.
So that was the first time I was ever on camera in a film.
And then I went on the set
of "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight,"
and that was where the scene was in a car wash.
So the picture I have is the lion in a car wash.
Every one of these photographs
has James in the photograph.
And it's like that's why it's funny or poignant or noir.
It's all him.
And when we go through the contact sheets,
it's him tenfold, a hundredfold.
If it's a beautiful actress, maybe 1,200-fold,
like it's a thicker envelope.
It was very early on.
It was like the third story I did for The Village Voice.
I did a story on sex workers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
It was '89, and it was pretty, pretty rough,
and these were girls who were basically neighborhood girls
who were also crack addicts.
They were homeless. Their families had kicked them out.
The only way that they could pay for their addiction
was by doing sex work.
They were like 20, 21, sweet as can be.
I would just hang out there and catch them between tricks,
and they'd jump in the car with me, and we would just talk.
And so James was assigned to photograph it
once I turned the article in.
But they didn't run the photos,
because they were concerned
that the girls might be identifiable.
But I remember I came to the apartment,
you came down, you got in the car,
and I said, "Do you wanna get a coffee?"
And he said, "No, I'm fine."
And I kind of couldn't believe that.
He was just sitting there with his camera,
ready to spend a night out.
- Without coffee - In Williamsburg,
without coffee.
And then when we got out there,
we really had to wait all night,
and James starts playing that we're cops on the stakeout.
He started calling me Pete.
And then he asked what I was gonna buy Marie for Christmas.
Remember this?
I treated you like a male cop?
Yes, you treated like a male cop
and asked what I bought my wife for Christmas.
And the reason I really loved that so much
is 'cause it was so damn boring, right?
Which is exactly how those guys would talk,
so it just tickled me.
And then that night we went after the day was over
and went and got fried chicken under the L.
That was the first job we did together.
And within like three or four days
we were kind of going out.
Then we did about four other jobs after that.
Mostly we worked on our own, but we had a lot of, I think,
understanding about each other's job habits.
I think that we gave each other a lot of freedom.
James had his place in Manhattan.
I have my place in Brooklyn.
And then weirdly we end up getting a place out here,
which is where we live together.
When we share any kind of time, it's out here.
Vogue had Abbott on and Penn shooting their covers.
But Bazaar had quite a few younger photographers.
Hiro was a famous photographer there
and he did a lot of very elegant covers.
Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel
were the co-art directors at the time.
They made a super elegant magazine
and very clever and beautifully designed.
Bea was also a book designer,
and Abboton and Bea did a book about Lartigue.
She loved photography, and photographers loved her.
Bea asked me if I would be the staff photographer.
They'd never had one.
They wanted to have something more news oriented.
And my first assignment was the Women's March for Equality
in August '71, where there were throngs of women
marching up Fifth Avenue,
and counter protestors all along the way.
There were right-to-life people,
but there were also men who were mocking the women.
There's that one famous picture of his
of one of the first feminist demonstrations in New York.
And there's all these people in the background.
They're all caught mid-sentence.
And there's this young female cop,
and she's standing next to a male cop.
It's almost like he's puzzled and she's exasperated.
I shot a lot of Halston fashion shows.
It was just his showroom.
I was not interested in fashion at all,
which is pretty funny,
considering I was the staff photographer
of a fashion magazine.
I spent a few days with Liza Minnelli
when "Cabaret" came out.
This is her godmother, named Kay Thompson,
who was the author of the Eloise books.
And in the middle is Earl Wilson,
who was a famous syndicated columnist.
So I was able to spend days with people,
which changed when it became much, much harder
to get that kind of access.
But I could photograph anybody I wanted virtually.
And I knew that Hitchcock was in town
because he was promoting "Frenzy."
Since I adored Hitchcock, I set up a meeting.
He always stayed at the St. Regis Hotel.
So I went there, knocked on the door, Hitchcock greeted me.
Alma, his wife, was there.
She ordered a tea for us.
But there were no PR people around.
In those days it wasn't that way.
At one poin this was the shot I got
that I probably liked the most.
Because you don't tend to see him that way.
It was wonderful,
the three of us just talking all afternoon.
My camera was a Nikon F with a flash,
just this very small Vivitar flash on top of it,
and that's all I ever used.
I really didn't take any equipment with me.
Later on I did, that being a 35- and a 50-millimeter lens.
That was all.
His flash work, I don't know how he does it.
The thing is it's so easy to do that
and make it look amateurish.
Something that looks like a single camera top flash
is like 101 done improperly.
James, that's part of his technical frigging genius.
It's almost clinical, but it's not detached.
He gets closer than I could get to.
I wouldn't put my camera that close to somebody's face
or frame it that tight.
What I loved about flash photography
was I loved the hard edge.
I love contrasty light anyway.
I love bright sunlight, and I like shooting at night.
I loved all the back date magazine stores
that used to be on Sixth Avenue.
The crime magazines and the photography.
That was a kind of journalism
that I really liked to check out.
Well, of course I loved Weegee.
I loved the obsessive nature of his work.
So much of it was nighttime work.
And Arbus I discovered much later.
There was a show called New Documents
John Szarkowski did at MoMA,
and there were three photographers:
Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, and Diane Arbus.
And I loved her use of flash.
I mean, it was what I was doing as well,
but she'd been doing it earlier,
and I think she was attracted to Weegee's work too.
Another part of the job, one of my favorites,
was photographing the endless parties and benefits going on.
It was my only paparazzi situation.
This was one of the parties.
It's called the Fabulous Forties.
And this is Jane Russell leading the conga Line.
Lana Turner arrived with an entourage
of I think her hairdressers
This is Cary Grant discussing his knife phobia
with dinner companions.
He had a lifelong fear of knives.
I was not just photographing celebrities;
I was photographing anything that I saw
that was amusing to me.
And Bea and I were just having a ball.
Because they ran four pages of these tiny little pictures,
and we were being as satirical as possible
and getting away with it.
I used to be on the floor laughing,
looking at his party pictures,
because the people in the pictures, you know,
this is how they wanted to look:
prosperous and a little bit famous
or well-known and having a great time.
And he just would capture their vanity,
and it was hilarious,
'cause they were so completely unaware
of how they were coming across.
In those days,
people were avoiding looking in the camera,
whereas now maybe they pose.
So I was able to get pictures
of people that were totally unposed and caught,
which was a great advantage.
Often I'd be the only photographer there.
I learned how to catch things quite well
under those circumstances, 'cause I was forced to.
I enjoyed everything I did there.
I was imposing my point of view, for sure.
Our point of view,
because Bea and I were collaborators, really, on that.
And what I insisted on doing
was all my own processing, all my own printing,
everything in my apartment.
I made my own edits and turned them in.
They might not use them all,
but they only used what I chose.
Consequently, they never touched my negatives,
and I own everything I ever shot.
One of the worst things in movies,
up until people got good at doing it,
is people driving in cars.
Because all those years
is crappy rear projection or whatever.
All those years.
And then "Gun Crazy."
Do you remember "Gun Crazy"?
Oh yeah, "Gun Crazy."
Joseph Lewis shot it in the backseat.
Remember?
When they do the robbery.
Camera's in the backseat.
It was just sitting there.
She gets out of the car, goes in, robs the bank,
comes back out, gets in the car, and they take off.
Take off!
It was...
It was so cool.
I told you to stay in the car.
I couldn't help it!
The copper came out there!
He's one of those people where the movies
are in his life every day.
He's quick to go to a line from a movie
to address the situation.
So I think it's so in his blood.
But I would say there's a degree
to which a certain kind of imagery
of the city that we see in James's work,
we only know that New York from movies.
I only know it for movies, anyway.
That's where you sort of live in it.
So it conjures up cinema to me.
The first thing I ever stole was a flip book.
I was eight years old, and I was in a Woolworth.
Incidentally, it was about the moving image
and still pictures, and how appropriate.
So I put it in my pocket, and I left,
and I showed it to my sister when I got home,
and she wound up ratting me out to my parents.
So I was made to go back to the store
and present it back to the salesperson there.
Years later, I was living in the Village,
and there was a antique store around the corner,
and they had the exact one that I had returned,
only it was 10 bucks.
But I bought it, of course,
and added it to my collection of flip books,
'cause over the years I've become flip book collector.
Both my parents loved movies, particularly my mother.
And we loved watching movies together.
I must have been about 12 years old,
and my mother said, "This great movie called 'Citizen Kane,'
you have to stay home from school today and watch it."
So we did.
And that's how I saw that for the first time.
I think in terms of form, I was influenced as much
by black-and-white movies as anything.
We're noir guys. We love that kind of lighting anyway.
But those guys influenced you
as much as any still photographers, right?
Yeah.
All those wonderful cinematographers.
John Alton and Gregg Toland.
Did you ever go to Cinemabilia?
Oh yeah.
Terry Ork to be the proprietor there.
Yeah, yeah.
Cinemabilia is kind of the birthplace
of New York punk in a way,
'cause that's where Tom Verlaine worked there
with Richard Lloyd,
and Richard Hell was kind of part of that scene.
And Terry Ork, the proprietor,
is the one who brings Verlaine and Lloyd together
that Television comes out of.
And then he's friendly with the poet Patti Smith,
and there's this introductions that go on.
'73 is such an interesting time in New York.
In some sense it's this really transitional time
between hippie culture
and to sort of more punk, avant garde culture.
And hippie culture, it goes to the country,
where it kind of is supposed to go.
That was the greatest cinematheque in the world,
those movie theaters on 42nd Street.
Because even though there were grotty,
there was hardly any porno then.
They would playing westerns. You could see a triple bill.
Liberty had westerns.
The Apollo had the foreign films.
That's right.
There was the Harris.
- The Selwyn. - The Selwyn.
And the Anco was the one.
That was the one he couldn't really go to.
It was too horrible.
They left the lights on in the balcony.
That's his scene of the famous,
"You piss on my date and you say you're sorry?"
No, they'd say, "Be cool, be cool."
"Be cool.
"You on my date and you say, 'Be cool'?"
My whole family on my father's side
were all members of Local 306
of the Motion Picture Projection Agency.
For a long time you couldn't show a movie in New York City
unless you had a union projection center,
no matter what it was.
And so I trained to be a motion picture projectionist.
I'd strike the carbon arc and the whole thing.
You didn't know this?
I knew you knew projection.
So they said,
"What theater do you want to go and train in?"
And I said, "How about the Thalia?"
which was this old revivalist house mirror,
95th Street.
So I went up there and I knocked on the door,
and the guy is like...
You know, the guy reading the Daily News?
"Yeah? What do you want?"
I said, "I'm a trainee from from 306."
He says, "Oh, okay, okay."
And he's working on the hot splicer.
'Cause the movie they're playing there
happens to be "Rebel Without a Cause."
And he says, "Fuck, man!"
The hot splicer is giving him a hard time,
so he rips some of the movie out
and throws it on the floor.
It's curling around like this.
And I'm the vice president
of the University of Wisconsin Film Society.
I'm horrified by this, you know?
So I pick it up, and he says,
"What, are you we gonna do this?"
And I said, "Nah, I gotta go."
I never really took this job off that.
What's the scene? Do you remember?
It's the great scene when he's telling him,
"Leave me..."
Jim Backus.
Jim Backus is over here, the mom, whoever-
Anne Doran.
Of course he knows all this stuff.
And James Dean is there, and he's in the middle.
And he's saying,
"You're tearing me apart!" - "Tearing me apart!"
You're tearing me apart!
What?
Harper's, there came a time
where they did a redesign of the magazine,
so there was no need for a staff photographer anymore,
so I lost that job.
But then The Voice moved over here,
the corner of 11th Street,
and I went over there
and started doing freelance work for them.
Everyone there was great.
And so, eventually, in 1976,
they asked me to be the staff photographer
along with Sylvia Plachy.
and Fred McDarrah had been there for years,
so he was running a kind of intern program.
He wasn't shooting quite as much.
Fred, he had really documented a lot of the '60s.
He was a gruff person.
He wasn't softly nurturing.
But he gave you the opportunity.
Between the two of you,
how many photos do you think you've taken?
Oh my god,
We can't even count it.
No, you can't go there.
It's too many
Millions. - Too many
- Millions? - Yeah.
- Probably, at least. - Yeah.
I was brought in by Clay Felker who bought the paper.
I used to work for him at New York Magazine.
A lot of us were people he brought in,
and we were thrown together,
and there was gonna be a new world.
James comes in during the Felker period
with George Delmerico.
And Clay Felker's personality,
it was definitely oil and water.
He came down, and the first thing he did
was assign everybody to write stories
about the importance of Halloween.
You have to imagine that staff of Bohemians,
leftists, Marxists and all of that, enraged.
One writer actually came up, tore up his paycheck,
and threw it at Felker, and it was Ron Rosenbaum.
On the other hand,
the paper fought Felker to more than a draw.
The Voice came to prominence in the '60s, certainly.
But I think the '70s and '80s,
it was really an important paper in the city.
Well the Village Voice was the story of New York
told in real time.
For me, moving to New York in '76,
the Village Voice was the map.
I would get the Voice because all the movie listings,
all the theaters, the Thalia.
Every Wednesday when the Voice came out,
I would circle my whole week.
I think what happened in the '70s
is you get original voices,
but not using the pronoun "I" so often
and writing as observers
of these different emerging cultures in the city.
It played a real role
in developing off-Broadway as a venue.
All these different areas, performance art,
that we covered regularly, the dance scene.
J. Hoberman on underground movies.
It also had a definitive role in music journalism
that Bob Christgau, more than anyone, put together
and almost an academy of Black writing.
The Voice was always the pioneering publication.
We would publish stuff, words,
that other people wouldn't publish
in newspapers at that time.
We covered stories that other people didn't cover,
and we broke news all the time
and were often stolen from by the Times and the tabloids.
They were either stealing the stories
or they were ignoring them,
and it was hard to say which was worse.
If you were interested in the city
and all you wanted to do was write about the city,
the Voice was the perfect place for that.
I mean, for me, until very recently,
my world ended at the Hudson River.
I think the strangest country you can fly to
from Kennedy Airport is America.
No one was really going the streets then.
There had been people over time who had,
but nobody was regularly doing street.
I remember I went to 34 murders one weekend.
I don't think I saw a reporter the whole time.
There was a gang Coney Island called the Homicides,
and I thought,
"Well, what if I just live with them for a while?"
I wrote the piece, and they wanted me to go around
with this guy, James Hamilton.
I'd never gone around with a photographer before.
I wasn't too big on it.
At that point in my life,
I think I thought the perfect magazine
was the New Yorker without cartoons.
And plus, these are people,
they're not called The Homicides for nothing.
But the guy running them was a guy named Outlaw.
His real name was George. Everybody called him Outlaw.
And I became pretty close to him.
He said it'd be all right.
The good thing about working with a gang
is if the main guy says it's all right, then it's all right.
The thing that's really interesting
is that you raise a camera lens to your basic gang kid,
they're either gonna turn away,
or they're gonna like play to it.
James had a way to do it where they did neither.
I think the Outlaw was very moved by James' pictures.
One reason you become a gang member is you want to be seen.
I think he James actually saw him,
and not as a gang guy, but him him.
And I think probably because James just,
he has a respect for people,
and he looks to see who they are,
and he saw George, I think.
And most of them died
not long after the story, in one way or another.
It was a violent scene, Coney Island in the '70s.
I think the most important thing
that we both were lucky enough to have at the Voice
was very much our own point of view.
And we were allowed to express it always
And to grow into it and therefore create a style
to the point where I would always recognize
a Sylvia picture, and...
- I could recognize you. - Yeah.
I think you're much more classical.
I always think of yours as being very elegant,
very beautifully lit.
Yeah, I was very concerned about the composition
to the extent that it was rigid almost.
To me composition was very important too.
But somehow your pictures feel looser than mine.
- But I'm much looser. - Yeah.
And also we had all those assignments.
Yeah.
We got introductions to people.
Fantastic introductions.
And then we developed our own film and printed it.
I didn't know that you developed all your own.
Oh yeah.
I came home, I worked at Night in the dark room upstairs.
I dried it in the bathroom in the shower.
Me too.
And they let you keep your pictures.
You and Sylvia couldn't have been more different
in your style of photography.
I thought we got along very well there because of that,
because we worked in different ways.
Yeah.
And with different editors and different writers.
A lot of the pictures I started doing
were for Guy Dupre.
Guy was just as visually aware as I am.
He would even point out things.
It was just a wonderful thing to be side by side,
and not being alone, and having a friend there.
And there were several people like that for me.
There was Anna Mayol, there was James Ridgeway.
Were there really fistfights?
I don't know. I think Stanley Crouch.
Ron Plotkin and Stanley Crouch, I think.
You remember.
I do.
There were a few very fiery people.
There was a lot of fire.
Yeah.
And a lot of arguments.
A lot of people yelled at the boys,
and it was something I got so used to
that, when people visited me in the office,
I would say, "Oh, that's just so and so.
He yells on Wednesdays."
There were fights, there were friendships,
people broke up.
There were loads of sexual relationships.
- Absolutely. - Yeah.
A lot of places now, that could not possibly happen.
That would be a bad thing.
There was just a lot of cross pollination.
I always said it was composed of people
who would never be at the same party together,
people who really hated each other,
but who all appreciated
the kind of freedom the paper offered,
and it was really an immense amount of freedom.
- I mean, crazy. - It was insane.
If I was the editor now, I would go like,
"No, you can't do that."
This is like one of the few times in the history of humanity
that the so-called writers and artists were in charge.
That's really what they were selling.
The leeway to set up the piece the way you want
rather than in a traditional news fashion
was really important.
The first feature I wrote was on James Brown,
and the first paragraph was something like,
"Everybody just calls him James.
We don't call him James Brown."
It's very vernacular.
It's just writing about James Brown
as a familiar, beloved guy in your neighborhood.
And then there were huge, vast ideological conflicts
between feminists, queers,
and whom we called the white Boys,
which was the political writers,
operating from a much more traditional place.
People invaded the front of the book.
Sometimes the front of the book
invaded the back of the book.
There were arguments about who got the cover.
The thing is everyone wrote their pieces on time,
and everybody had their say.
Everybody got into the paper.
I was removed from the Voice in so many ways
because I worked in the political sphere there,
the cultural sphere.
I covered everything,
but I didn't have to get involved with office politics ever.
No.
Because I didn't hang out there.
I would come and deliver and walk away.
I could observe it sort of from a distance.
I loved being part of the family,
which is why I've always liked staff jobs.
I like being part of something bigger.
And this was the Voice, the whole building.
Downstairs was classified.
Editorial was on the top floor,
and that's where I'd deliver these pictures.
He drifted in and out,
but people drifted in and out of his apartment,
which really was part of the paper.
You would just go up there and walk in and hang out.
I talk to other people from the Village Voice
from that time period.
They always talk about you as being
this kind of silent, zen presence amongst all this mania.
Everybody had a crush on you, first of all.
Oh, yeah, yeah, right.
I know that was going on.
We can't go there.
The first story we worked on
was about these Chinese youth gangs.
That's right.
But we didn't work together.
We barely saw each other.
I don't even think I really knew him at all, you know?
So he took the pictures that went with the story.
And then I guess everybody liked it,
so then this idea came up
that we should go across the country,
the United States, the whole thing,
The editor at the time
was a woman named Marianne Partridge.
Right? - Yeah.
And she was game to do things like this.
And it was basically picking up stories as we went.
I guess the most memorable one
was the Cullen Davis murder story.
Cullen Davis was this extremely rich Texan
who allegedly murdered his stepdaughter
and his wife's lover.
So he got off, of course.
And then the jury and the judge
went out for a party after the thing,
so we got in there, we were just hanging out with them.
Oh, you know, where we're from,
it's not really customary for the judge and the jury
to have a party after the verdict.
They didn't seem to mind.
So I essentially have a sort of a mugshot-style picture
of the judge at this party,
and Cullen with his new lover,
and they both got religion, and everything was hunky dory.
James is cognizant of what you're looking to do
and works at not interfering with that.
Also, it's a challenge 'cause your writing
has to be up to the level of James's photography.
I think James and I are in the same business,
but he just gets there a lot faster and a lot stronger.
It was very depressing in a lot of ways,
'cause I've been driving the car,
I'm thinking about the story.
I gotta alk to this guy and talk to that guy
and talk to this guy.
And Hamilton's just sort of...
He could puts his camera out the door or the window.
He's not even looking, right?
And so now he takes this picture,
and it's better than anything I could.
For a lot of stories,
we'd just come up with a story together,
and they were often my ideas,
but I would say, "What do you think about this?"
And he'd go, "Yeah, I like that."
And James would be the guy
who was gonna provide the evidence for the case
that this is worth your while.
And he was brilliant at that,
because we really are of the same mindset.
Absolutely.
We had arguments,
but I don't remember any aesthetic argument we ever had,
and we must've done 50 stories together.
Long stories.
I don't even remember arguments period.
I remember a few arguments.
And the Florida one was like two parts.
I could imagine what everybody else thought,
like, "Why are these assholes taking up all this space?"
It's a lot of space.
Pictures ran big.
Art director happened to be a good friend of ours,
George Delmerico. - That helped.
George Delmerico.
All photographers were treated really well.
He never cropped pictures,
and he just had an enormous amount of respect for the image.
He was an immensely creative guy, an incredible eye,
and an ability to be erudite without being pretentious.
He had this apartment with a skylight on Christopher Street,
and it would snow in through the skylight
and we would just sit up doing newspaper layouts
all the time together.
With Felker you began to see
a more artistic kind of photography,
complimenting the glazer design of the paper.
And George as an art director cultivated all this,
Mapplethorpe and others, Peter Hujar.
It's this merger of art and journalism,
where one was not in charge of the other,
but rather they were in constant clashing,
constant dialectic, the two elements of the paper.
So you could be as artful as you wanted to be,
but it had to work as journalism too.
You could be as journalistic as you wanted to be,
but it had to work as art.
Sylvia, her work exudes empathy.
With James, his work exudes formality,
but the subject is still there in very, very high relief.
That's a terrific balance and combination.
The only time our paths ever crossed on the road,
taking pictures, we were both assigned accidentally
to photograph a photographer.
Not only a photographer but-
James Van Der Zee.
James Van Der Zee,
one of the great photographers
of Harlem. - In Harlem.
And so she took my picture, and I guess I took yours.
With him.
I always felt like I was always fighting
the quality of newspaper.
He was fighting it. I wasn't fighting.
You weren't fighting it. I know you weren't.
You embraced it.
I embraced it.
I liked that messy, grayed out...
See, okay, another difference.
It's more tactile. It's warmer.
You can feel it.
You can touch the picture, and it's warm
instead of a cold, shiny paper.
Yeah, I wanted them to jump off the page.
James kind of pioneered the closeup picture
of somebody that would appear in a newspaper.
Somehow he was able to get this face
to pop off the back, almost 3D.
I think that a lot of people have emulated that since,
because it's so remarkable,
and he should've got more credit for that.
But he's not that kind of guy.
I would be so fanatical about my pictures
that I would actually go to the plant...
where did the printing, like 5:00, 6:00 in the morning,
just to make sure that the pictures looked good
and had enough contrast and all that.
And sometimes I would even take a black crayon
and I would darken the pictures.
Then Rupert Murdoch bought New York Magazine
and the Village Voice, and so there was no Felker anymore.
The first thing he did was fire the editor,
and everyone united and said, "We're all on strike.
You have bought $45 million worth of typewriters
unless you let the editor fill out her contract."
I mean, we defeated Murdoch.
And as a response to this whole thing,
we published that alligator on the cover,
on the theory that it was the most unlikely cover
that would ever be in a newspaper,
partly as a middle finger raised to Murdoch.
We took it 100% seriously.
That was one thing I really liked working with you,
because it was all about the work,
and so it was really a good partnership.
Partners, baby.
Yes.
You have to go like this, James.
Yes, yes. Okay.
This is the regular refrigerator,
and this is the wine cooler,
which is perfect for keeping my film and chemicals
at the proper temperature, which is about 68 degrees.
And then, this is my developing tank.
And what I do,
is I
fill this with water.
This I put developer in this.
I have fixer in all the time.
And so what I do is I lower the film.
These are 35 millimeter reels
that I spool with film
and then drop these in, in the dark,
and develop 'em for whatever length of time.
Then I put them in in the water
to stop the developing and rinse them,
and then I put 'em in the fixer
to fix 'em for a certain length of time.
And once they're in the fixer, I can turn the light on.
And then I put 'em in here, in the water,
and carry them into the bathroom,
'cause there's no running water in here.
When there was Bradley's,
this fantastic jazz bar downstairs,
the piano was right under here.
I would work until 4:00 in the morning,
and they'd be playing until 4:00 in the morning.
Often at the Voice, if I wanted to meet somebody,
I would suggest a story.
I had always wanted to meet George Romero,
'cause I loved the way he worked,
so I enlisted the aid of a critic there named Tom Allen,
who loved to write about independent filmmakers.
We hung out at the mall,
where he was in the process of wrapping "Dawn of the Dead."
And so I took pictures there, in his editing room,
and we just palled around for a couple of days,
just really hit it off.
And he asked me if I would be his still photographer
on his next film.
I said, "But don't I have to get in the union?"
He said, "I'll get you in the union."
And I said, "Well, as long as I can take a leave
from the paper, yeah."
So that's what I did
When I was at Rolling Stone,
George's publicist said,
"If you do a story on this movie we're making,
you can be an extra."
They had this zombie school
where you're supposed to learn how to be a zombie,
which we got there late, so I missed.
And so I did everything wrong,
and it was so hilarious, because they were saying like,
"You walk with your hands like this,
and I'm walking like that.
He put me in a whole bunch of scenes.
I think it's 'cause it was so funny.
Okay, let's go.
And I have a closeup, trying to get into Penny's.
Pop 'em right here.
I liked his sense of humor.
He didn't tear his hair out 'cause I missed zombie school.
And then I went to work for his producer,
Richard Rubenstein.
So then James came and did Knightriders."
James is in that movie too.
He's in every movie he shoots.
Morgan, Morgan, please concentrate.
The plot is people dressing up as knights,
King Arthur's Knights, as a matter of fact,
but on motorcycles, and jousting on motorcycles.
So it was a really wild summer.
Susan Vermazen wound up being there
the entire time I was, on the set.
I had met her first when she was a photo editor
working for Rolling Stone.
Stephen King was there that summer.
It was Ed Harris's first major role.
He was Arthur.
Half the crew were stunt people,
and half of them wound up in the hospital once or twice.
But they were great, heroic guys.
Stunts unlimited.
They were fantastic.
They could do anything, and they were fun,
and they were relaxed, and everybody else was so tortured.
George is a prince,
totally dedicated and devoted to the crew.
So much fun to be with.
He just made the whole process joyful.
Normally it was stills photographer photographs,
essentially what the camera is seeing
so that the pictures can be used for publicity,
which is the most boring part of that job to me.
The only way I could have fun doing it
was to treat it like a documentary.
George liked that idea.
I didn't even know that stills
was a job that you can have.
When I did "She's Gotta Have It,"
I didn't know it was something
he was supposed to pay me for.
I didn't know it was like a job.
I thought it was just something you did
'cause your older brother made you do it.
One picture has to tell the story.
You're distilling that scene down to that one frame,
Someone has a gesture,
someone in the moment when they're looking at each other.
And behind the scenes,
that's a good part of the job too.
And you're documenting something for the record,
and only you were there to record it.
The base stuff, the etiquette,
a lot of it's mostly common sense,
things like not moving around if you can help it.
I had a little bit more flexibility with Spike,
and some of it I learned by getting my head chewed off
by De Niro or something like that.
I would get yelled out by the best.
The summer after "Knightriders," George asked me back
to photograph the making of "Creepshow,"
and Hal Holbrook and I became great pals.
We would sneak off on his motorcycle
and fly ultralights over Pittsburgh
to the dismay of the producers.
You know what they used to say about Spencer Tracy?
Spencer Tracy was playing.
Spencer Tracy was...
They thought he was always playing it very cool on the set
the way he would walk around and kind of...
He was looking for his marks.
I think it's very apparent
when you look at James' photographs,
oh, that's a James Hamilton photograph.
I love his street photography, and you know this.
and your photography of children,
and your photography of dogs.
There's a delight that you have
in the world and how it works.
On street photographs,
you capture this split second like, I don't know,
a lot of times it shows almost a loneliness in people.
But also the choreography of street life.
Now it's different
if you're using a camera and not a phone.
In what way?
Because people are used to...
Everybody takes...
Everybody taking pictures with phones.
But if you have a camera,
it means you're a little more serious about it.
Yes, I know.
I just went for a walk in the park.
Yeah.
And I took my camera.
And two women and a bulldog were right there,
and I stopped with the dog,
and one of the women say, "Are your photographer?"
No, it's different.
And I said, "Yes."
She said, "What do you take pictures of?"
Yeah.
So I said, "Life."
Yeah. Right.
The pictures that mean the most to me
are the pictures that I was so happy and lucky to find.
Yeah, I think the best pictures,
it's always some little thing that happens.
Very often that's the potion
And when you're in the street,
that's gonna happen.
Yes.
And you have to be open to anything happening.
I've been really honing in on James' stuff
in the last couple years.
There's this one street work that frigging blew my mind.
That shot could be a Cartier-Bresson
It's just perfect. The moment, the framing.
The wheel's there, and the wheel's there,
and your eye goes nuts.
Everything about it is just
so perfect that it's infuriating.
Even when I worked on a story
where we were running through the streets,
'cause there was a demonstration going on or a riot,
he could almost do it on the run, decide where the frame is,
and when the picture appeared, it was amazing to me
how it looked like somebody had posed.
And then I love the fact that
every summer he's there in the water
with his waterproof camera.
We're all out there in the waves,
and he's standing in this place, 'cause he's such a seal,
but he's there taking photographs, and we're all going up.
We're all shooting up into the waves.
But you know what that means is that the wave is breaking,
and it's gonna break on him.
That's like when you talk about
how he's completely in his photographic world
when he photographs.
And how journalists have had to say,
"James, psst, there's a truck coming down the street."
Only now, when I look back at pictures,
I can kind of separate the decades and the years.
Because my contact sheets are like a diary.
So I can segment time that way.
I was really happiest when I was working alongside a writer.
First of all, most of them were my friends
or became friends.
Kathy and I did several long-distance stories.
For you, I think when we worked together,
we, maybe at the end of the day,
kind of discussed what we saw or what we felt about it.
And during the day, you're almost on your own track.
I was just following along with journalists.
I didn't create the story.
It's nothing like what you do.
Yeah, but you would shoot the hell out of an event.
Like something like when we did
Operation Rescue together in LA.
You shoot outside the clinic when everybody's like
stopping the women from going in to get abortions.
You go to Melody Tent
the Friday night that they have the big rally
around the baby's coffin.
Yeah, you're following the journalist,
but you're really following the journalist.
You are all over that story.
One of the great pictures that James took
for a story that mattered a lot to me
was when I exposed a Nazi war criminal
who was living secretly in Westchester.
And then, when he opened the door...
He went like this.
I was doing a lot of investigative reporting
at that time, with Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett.
Wayne Barrett was notoriously the toughest writer
at the Voice on politicians or anybody.
We could actually force a mayor out of office,
which we did in the case of Koch, thanks to Wayne Barrett.
We went after Giuliani. We went after all office holders.
I remember Wayne throwing a pencil at Giuliani.
The first sort of big assignment we did together
was the Philippines.
And I had never done any farm reporting.
I had done stuff in Central America.
I'd been to Haiti and Honduras and Nicaragua.
After we came back from the Philippines,
we both wanted to do the same thing again.
And then the students began this huge protest in Beijing.
And the day before we left,
the army assaulted the students in Tienanmen.
We hooked up with these students from Beijing University.
They thought they were gonna be dead.
They all told me, "The army is going to come
and kill all of us."
The government had set up these makeshift morgues
around the city because they killed so many people.
And we broke into a morgue and unzipped body bags.
This was late at night,
and I was using a flash, 'cause I had to,
and that gave us away.
And so then we were chased out of there.
And it was great to be with Joe in a situation like that.
We sent the film back to New York
via diplomatic pouch.
So The Voice got the film, developed it,
and ran on the front page.
That was a big deal
Because nobody else had.
Nobody had pictures of the dead except James.
It was on Monday night.
Monday night was closing night,
and David Schneiderman, who was the editor then,
he came out of his office
and stopped to talk to some people in the art department.
And then he said, "Well, someone could do a picture
every week on the front over the contents page.
That that would be good.
Do you know somebody like that?"
I jumped.
I learned that from George, to jump.
Well they gave me a title,
and they put it up there like in a big marquee
and it said "Sylvia's Plachy's Unguided Tour."
And that's why everybody remembered it,
because whoever remembers the little...
That's right.
Thing underneath the picture?
I wanted it to be a picture that could be anything,
and that was the most wonderful thing I have ever had.
That was the lure to attract me away from The Voice
to go to New York Observer.
'Cause they offered you an unguided tour.
They said you could do two pictures a week there,
anything you want.
You were free to choose whatever you wanted.
Yes.
- And they ran. - How about that?
Did they ever object to a choice?
Never.
How could they?
So Fred sent me out on my very, very first assignment.
There's this notorious punk rocker named G.G. Allin,
and he was known for a couple things.
He wanted to die on stage.
He was also known to drink laxatives
before he went on stage, and he wore diapers sometimes
and he'd throw his loose shit at you
in the audience.
So I went to this subterranean club, and he had a diaper.
Luckily he didn't throw shit at me.
But he was rolling around on the ground,
and it was just nuts.
I was photograph...
I was photographing like...
Half using my camera as a shield
in case something came at me.
We were provocative with a cause.
Look, Tom Wolfe's definition of journalism was,
"Do you believe people live like this?"
That's always was my attitude.
Is there really a performance artist
who shoves yams up her butt, claiming poetry,
and then shits it out at a nightclub
while declaiming this remarkable verse,
this transformative, terrifying verse.
Like watching Medea, the Greek tragedy.
She was on the cover of the paper.
And you shot the photo, James.
It seemed like an appropriate photo.
I mean, for Karen Finley.
Guys at the front of the book,
the white boys were the investigative journalists
were just absolutely furious
that they didn't see that as that's what our paper is,
which kind of delighted everybody else.
It was always about space.
Who's gonna get the more space?
But you work in both sides, right?
I was doing pictures for every...
In every aspect of the paper.
Portraits, features, criticism, restaurant pictures.
Jim Walcott was the TV critic,
and they would send over these handouts from the TV shows,
and all of them, they were terrible pictures,
so I would shoot my own pictures off the TV screen
and have fun with it.
So I was doing just about everything you could think of.
There were so many schools of art,
so to speak, practicing.
James was going to certain clubs and hearing certain music.
I was going to different clubs and hearing different music.
There was just so much cultural activity,
some of which ended up sort of being in conversation
with other facets of that culture.
So there was all this innovation going on.
The Voice created that kind of cross pollination
that keeps replicating.
In the '80s you get people like Greg Tate,
who had an original voice that tons of people imitated.
But he was able to blend
what was something personally meaningful to him
with why it had ramifications for the rest of the culture.
AIDS changed the tenor of the paper
and in a way made it more militant.
We had to cope with this epidemic that was in our midst,
and we were the epicenter of the epidemic.
So a lot of emphasis was placed on
questions of health and mortality,
especially for young people.
There was this new attitude of seriousness,
that you couldn't be disengaged from the events around you.
I had never photographed anyone
essentially on their deathbed,
but that's what I was doing in some cases.
At first, I didn't know how to approach it, really.
I had to be comfortable with the person.
I had to make them feel comfortable with me.
All of it had to be done with care.
I think The Village Voice must look handmade
to people who read it now,
compared to the kind of slick, polished writing
and art that there is now.
But that's okay. That's a different aesthetic.
It's just that there's a loss and there's a gain,
and the gain is this incredible flexibility
to make something perfect in so many different ways.
But the loss is putting your hands on something
and then creating it anew
so that it's a merger of aesthetics that is uniquely yours.
Did having that direction,
purpose with the assignments, was that beneficial to you?
Oh, sure.
'Cause it was necessary for me to communicate.
In a way that was the biggest challenge,
is to make the work lucid, clear
and appropriate to the story and whatever job I was doing.
it was a challenge, it was a lot of fun,
and I loved just taking pictures for myself.
I never felt worn out by the work, really.
The thing is you would have super serious
important stories,
but you also would always have a sense of
some of just the sheer joy and oddity
and craziness of the world.
I think that mixture is so important.
So much now, it's like we're super serious or super shallow.
And I think we really need this other sense of life
as being very wacky, fun, joyful, heartbreaking.
When we were working at The Village Voice,
it was before the computer, mostly,
and so people would get up from their desk
and go over to the other desk
and argue with someone if they had a problem.
And everything was much more personal, much more hands-on.
Then the computer came in,
and then I noticed that everybody became more like robots,
and if you wanted to complain to someone,
you sent them an email,
and everybody just looked ahead of themselves,
and it was less open, and nobody talked to each other,
nobody touched each other, nobody yelled at each other,
nobody loved each other.
It was through a machine, sanitized, clean and dead.
There can be no Bohemia in Manhattan anymore
in an organized sense, because it's too expensive.
So Bohemia is dispersed.
It's in 80 different places.
That's not the same.
And to me, that's almost a political statement,
because it reduces the power of Bohemia substantially
and makes it into another commodity.
And so it's the commodification of New Yorkness
that makes New York in some way insufferable.
But I go to the Square during the pandemic,
and lo and behold, the kids are resplendent
in neo tie-dyes and blue hair and all of that,
and it's incredibly moving to me.
So there's still this kernel in the Village,
and maybe in New York, too, of the unmanageable.
And I think what the Voice really stood for
above all else is unmanageability.
Never knew what you would find when you opened the paper.
Its positions were completely unpredictable.
So that kind of unmanageability, to me,
is a quality that maybe New York still has.
You come here as a banker,
but you leave as some kind of weird person
that you never were.
So I think everybody from Hamilton to everyone else
who was at the paper for any time
just became a different self as a result.
They became new,
and they photographed their new selves,
or they wrote about their new selves,
and I think that's very special.
I told you I worked with Craig Claiborne, right?
You wanna see Craig Claiborne?
Come here.
He's even on a checkered tablecloth.
I spent seven years photographing the great chefs
who came to Craig's house
to cook for his New York Times pieces.
Here's a shot with some of his pals
on a particularly wild weekend.
I did manage to do a lot of freelance work.
I was never a good hustling for it.
It was usually when somebody came to me.
I didn't love doing freelance,
because I no longer had control over my work.
But Susan Vermazen was the photo editor
at New York Magazine,
so she would call me often for pictures.
Almost all of it was color,
and so I had a chance to do much more color
than I normally would've done.
Because he was so established at New York,
if I would say something like, "You cannot crop this photo,"
they would listen.
But not always.
He did Jane Pauley, and he did Denzel Washington.
And some people said that's why Dinkins won the election,
because James did him so sympathetically.
Oh, and Giuliani. This wasn't a cover.
And when James got back, he said to me
he reminded him of Boo Radley.
and Robert Altman, that's another one,
and Altman never forgot him.
'Cause people who are really smart
want James's look at things.
And then the preppy murder cover became a very famous cover.
He was good-looking and tall and rich,
so it was like all the elements for a story
that was just being covered to death.
So James went and shot him,
and the pictures came back,
and people thought he just made him look so good.
He looks like a model. It's like a GQ cover.
And it's like, no, it's not.
I was determined to get beneath that surface,
because it was a very polished surface.
I remember if you covered up one side of his face,
he looked normal,
and if you covered up the other side of his face,
he was psychotic.
Vanity Fair and a lot of other publications
would call me to photograph criminals for some reason.
A lot of murderers and terrorists and people like that
and usually in jumpsuits in prison.
And I was on death row to photograph Henry Lee Lucas.
And George Bush commuted his sentence,
and he didn't get death in Texas.
That's hard to get out of.
Tienanmen Square led to the London Sunday Times Magazine
asking me if I would go to Ethiopia to cover the war there.
I told the Voice I'll be gone a few weeks
and it turned into months,
because we were with a rebel convoy in the middle of nowhere
and no way to communicate
with the outside world or anything.
James for a while turned into this type of person
that we got to know out in the field.
They're adrenaline junkies, and I had a little bit of that.
He had a lot of it.
It's hard to look at a lot of those pictures.
There was death all around,
'cause I was covering the famine as well.
We were driving overland at night,
and I was in a petrol truck,
and there were mines all over the place,
and then trucks were exploded all along the route.
In a way I was sort of grateful to be in a petrol truck,
because I knew it'd be fast.
The reason we drove all night
is 'cause the government MiGs were not qualified
to bomb at night.
I was either taking pictures recklessly,
I mean dangerously,
or I was running and not thinking about taking pictures.
One time I was literally being chased
by MiGs firing rockets.
It was a terrifying time.
We just wanted to be invisible.
But I had to take pictures too, so.
But it was a very difficult coming down from that trip,
'cause it was a long haul.
It takes a certain amount of dedication.
- And experience. - A lot of dedication
to do that, and I think it would take over your life.
I can't imagine having a partner and doing that.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'd never seen that kind of horror in war.
I left the Voice sometime in the late winter of '93.
Joe Conason had mentioned
that I'd be a good fit at The Observer,
where he was working.
They offered me something I could not refuse,
which was two pictures a week that were anything I wanted.
Anything he wanted.
They ran very large.
It would be a picture on page two
and then a picture on page four.
You'd turn the page and the second one would be there.
So in order to limit myself a little bit,
once I took one picture, I had to think of some way
the second picture would relate to it in some funny way.
So that's what I would do to make a game of it for myself.
He was always making puzzles, you know,
and letting people figure out what he was doing.
- That's right. - It was really fun.
I was captivated by The Observer.
It's hard to describe now
how much of a monumental thing it was when it came out.
This pink paper, same color as the Financial Times,
but so different.
It was a challenge to be a photographer
on the salmon...
You're telling me.
I would dare say
The main thing I remember about it,
I was reading "Sex and the City,"
the Candace Bushnell column
that became the famous TV series.
The column is fantastic. The TV show is very different.
What struck me about it was,
on the front page of this broadsheet,
you'd have a column like "Sex and the City"
cheek by jowl with politics, financial news.
It was social journalism,
and it was just as important as the other stuff.
A few years later, Peter Kaplan became the editor,
who was just a complete force of nature
and really made the paper into something bigger.
Peter, one of his mentors was Clay Felker,
and what he had to offer was real estate,
meaning on the page,
and great editing and wonderful headlines.
I couldn't believe the kind of stuff
they'd run on the front page.
For a moment, it was this place where all these writers
could really do whatever the hell they wanted.
I didn't really work with writers so much there,
and it was almost entirely New York based, New York stories.
The Voice was about New York as well as many other things.
The things that Peter wanted to cover was who's powerful?
What are they doing? What are their plans?
Whether it's politics, business, culture,
how does the power structure really work?
Unlike the Voice, which was sort of critical of the media
in a way that wasn't always welcomed,
The Observer was kind of the pet.
I mean, everybody in the media in New York
read it every week.
Peter brought in some great illustrators. Barry Blitt.
Drew Friedman. - Great artists.
Yeah. Victor Juhasz,
Philip Burke and Robert Grossman.
He had the best illustrating staff in New York.
- We would never- - On the front page,
Almost never run pictures on the front page.
We would run...
There were no photographs on the front page.
This was a bit of a sore point.
Nobody knew I existed as a photographer there.
James is quiet, and I'm very talkative,
and I tend to Jabber on,
and that was always a problem
when I was interviewing people.
I mean, maybe it disarmed some people.
And I would observe James being silent
and how effective that was.
It was sometimes a reminder to shut up.
I'd love to see him work,
and I grew up in '70s and '80s New York,
and I always felt, yes, I recognized that bit of grit
even in his most formal portraits.
I was always surprised at how slightly naughty
some of them would turn out to be.
I would say there's a surprising number of photographs
where the legs are...
There were the subjects revealing
their most vulnerable part.
The mid to late '90s was the era
when The Observer really thrived.
We worked outta this crazy, madcap townhouse on 64th Street,
and that was part of the appeal.
Completely not up to fire code.
You'd walk in, and there was a swirling marble staircase.
It was gorgeous. It was like something out of a movie set.
Peter had a knack for making you feel
like you were starring in a 1930s screwball comedy.
I mean, what a way to live.
It was "His Girl Friday."
I felt like Rosalind Russell.
Yeah, don't worry. I'm on the job.
The person that I connected with there
was Peter Bogdanovich,
because they asked me to photograph him,
and then we became kind of friendly.
They wanted to have a little picture of him
next to his column.
He would write about the DVD of the week.
But it was a tiny picture,
and they would have my credit there every week.
And I thought that's stupid.
But then I decided that I would have some fun with Peter,
so I would tell them the name of a character
from a film instead of my name.
But they would be as obscure as I could make them
to amuse Bogdanovich.
And I didn't hear from him about it
until one day he called me.
He said, "All right, all right! Who is it?"
'Cause it was somebody that he didn't recognize suddenly.
I was staying in a hotel in Gramercy,
and I was told somebody's coming from The Observer
to take your picture.
And I thought, "Oh, it's gonna be one of those ones
right in in the inside second page of The Observer."
I love those.
It's where you see who's in town.
And for the first time in my life,
I'm one of the people who's in town.
A guy shows up. He said, "Hi, I'm James."
He's very kind of gentle, and he's sort of looking at me
and looking at the space, and kind of guides me over here,
and everything's done with a kind of light touch.
I don't get the sense he's actively doing something
to set the mood.
He's just being himself
and watching what's in front of his camera.
But we talk about movies.
And quickly I get...
I think he knows everything.
And at the end of it he says,
"You should come over one day,
and I'll show you some of my..."
Because he told me I took a picture of this...
So my normal reaction to that would be,
"Thank you one. Maybe one day we will."
But in this case I was like, "Well, I'll see you tomorrow."
And so I went, and he's living above the Reservoir Bar
on University Place,
and he's got a Jeep, and it has a press pass on it.
He seems to be able to park anywhere he wants.
And he's got this amazing spot
that's essentially he's living in a dark room
filled with print,
and quickly I'm seeing Francois Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa.
And also sort of reportage. And I'm fascinated.
And he's also quoting movies left and right,
and I'm trying to keep up.
And I know a lot of 'em,
but I don't know a lot of 'em.
And I remember thinking,
"This is James Stewart in a 'Rear Window.'"
This is the guy.
And there are thousands of these pictures.
And I felt like it's all one body of work,
even though it's so many kinds of things.
But he was an institution.
He's been a part of my circle of New York friends
and New York life ever since then.
Then, we liked him so much,
we said, "Why do we need somebody else
to take pictures on our movies?
Why don't you do that?"
I'd rather have you document our movie
like it's part of the city
rather than having someone who does things
that the studio is telling him to do.
So he took pictures on the set of "The Royal Tenenbaums."
It was really fun to watch him work,
because he was all over it.
He just was in control of every aspect of the film.
I abandoned 35 millimeter around 1985
and started working with this guy,
which is Pentax 645, which is a big camera.
And I would hold it like that.
But this is the sound it makes.
It doesn't have batteries in it, but it's a real clunker.
It makes a really loud noise.
So I wouldn't shoot while they were filming,
which most still people do.
I would run in at the end
and set something up briefly, and then run out.
The thing is, the old way on movie sets
was the camera's gonna make a sound,
and so what you ended up with was
a guy with a big blimped camera with a long lens
who's meant to go over there,
taking pictures that are essentially
something like still frames from the movie.
Essentially he's photographing movie stars
from the wrong camera angle.
James's approach was that he was really more interested
in what was happening around the set,
and to me, that's what's worth getting,
so that's why I always liked having him instead,
along with the fact that we can wrap
and then we can go off and have a drink somewhere.
Wes wanted me to make photos for a lot of the props.
Book jackets.
Magazines.
Even an album cover.
We had a lot of fun with that.
And then I went to India for "Darjeeling Limited,"
and Wes had his great crew of actors
and my dear friend, Bob Yeoman, who shoots all his films,
and Adrian Brody, who I knew from the age of five,
because he was Sylvia Plachy's son.
It's just much more fun
if I know the people that I'm working with,
if they're friends.
I'm sure that I shoot more than most still photographers do,
because subsequently people would complain about it,
that I'm doing too much.
One of my very best friends was Bill Paxton,
and he directed a film called "Frailty,"
So I worked on that with him.
That was great.
We lived in across the hall from each other in a motel,
and we would plot out scenes every night.
Bill is a friend since the early '70s.
He's like a brother to me.
Whenever I went to LA,
whatever I was doing, I would stay with him.
So one night he said, "You wanna come on my paper route?"
This was before he made it big,
and he was actually delivering papers every night.
And he actually was the scout on "Carrie."
He found that house.
He knew a lot of great haunts and places to go in LA.
We went to a lot of cemeteries and Keaton's grave.
And Bill is buried just up the hill from there.
And then I worked with Noah Bombach
on a film called "The Squid and the Whale."
Noah would put me in his films, little cameos, subsequently.
Some of the bears are not well served.
The work is more intimate than the space
Still feels weird.
I feel like my parents are splitting up.
And then Wes put me in his films too.
I put him in the Royal Tenenbaums
because I liked the way he looked.
He's photogenic, and he looked like belonged in this house.
I figured he could probably play bridge,
which is what he does in the scene,
because he generally knows how to do things.
And I feel like I thought probably his mother played bridge.
"Life Aquatic" I had a part as a photographer
and blew my line
in front of hundreds and hundreds of extras.
I was a nervous wreck doing that.
Captain Zi...
Captain Zissou, can I get a shot of you
with Captain Hennessy?
Where?
Make it quick.
He's also in "Fantastic Mr. Fox."
28 pine cones fired, 22 targets hit.
Decoy phase, go.
Every day I receive a photograph from James,
and I put it in a special file, Hamilton's,
and it's an incredible ongoing document
of the times and places of his life.
But when I think of New York, my life here,
James was always a part of it.
I have a lot of experiences of crawling into that Jeep
and buzzing around this place.
Not a comfortable way to get around at all,
but you can get a lot done.
Most of my history is living in New York,
and the people that pass through are the portraits.
I think that's what I've done mostly,
is document my life in New York.
It's like a diary really.
I had met James in the '80s
when he photographed Sonic Youth,
and it was for a Village Voice piece.
I didn't know who he was.
I just remember being somewhat kind of bratty
when I went over there.
I had a hat that I had picked up on tour
that was just kind of terrible.
It was like a cap that said "party till you puke in it,"
So I just loved wearing this hat
because it was so offensive and terrible
and I wore it for this shoot.
And James was, he was very easy to deal with,
as most photographers can be really persnickety,
but James was just kind of very mellow,
and he kinda shot and kinda shot.
At some point he just sort of looked at me and said like,
"Let's lose the hat."
You've done a few album covers.
The "Songs for Drella," I had no idea you had done that.
You have to look at those contact sheets.
You've got hundreds of head shots of John Kale,
hundreds of headshot of Lou Reed.
And then there's one shot
where Lou has a cigarette like this,
and he has this great big teethy smile.
Oh yeah. I remember that.
And it's just like, "What?"
I'm with the loop, like, "What?"
He's smiling!
Lou Reed's smiling! - He's smiling!
For a journalist!
Lou is like really sneering in this one.
Well.
Classic.
I think this is long before he was with Laurie.
I did some work on one of her record covers, "Big Science."
And you shot her with Anne Waldman at the Nova Convention.
I did. That was way back.
She's like a little kid.
How are you thinking
you're gonna use these in the book?
Full page, full bleed if possible, without cropping them.
We never crop James Hamilton's photographs.
Wow.
Never.
I didn't start out to be a portrait photographer.
I sort of had to be,
because that's what a commercial photographer was
in my area.
It was always journalism.
Anytime it was a portrait, I just wanted James.
I didn't want anyone else. It would be boring.
James sees who you are.
His portraits are so revealing.
He just had such a point of view in every photo,
without you being hit on the head with it.
You would just respond to this film
like somebody punched you in the chest,
grabbed your heart, twist it, and take it back out.
Hamilton had this way of being able to,
no matter what that person,
that phony moron we were doing a story on
was trying to cover up all these years,
Jimmy would get there, and he'd take a picture,
and he'd reveal that one thing
that the guy had been trying to hide.
I just took for granted that, if we had 15 minutes,
James would get a great shot.
He just knew how to do that.
I think his imagination actually saw a finished product.
With these junkets and things like that,
when I would photograph film people or theater people
or even music people, the time was limited
that you had to create something.
Doing portraits of celebrities became a very
in and out, 15-minute process.
There were exceptions.
There was this great time with Daniel Day Lewis
when "There Will Be Blood" came out.
We were in a room together for a long time
and talked much more than I photographed.
Didn't he do that dance from...
Oh yeah, both of us,
we were talking about "Treasure of Sierra Madre,"
and I said, "I love the moment where Walter Houston
does that dance when he finds gold,"
and so we both got up and did the dance together.
I was thinking of James
in relation to a photographer like Avedon
and his famous pictures of the Chicago Seven.
They're so posed, even though the actors are acting out,
the background is so evident
that there's a self-consciousness
that James' photos don't have,
because there's a journalistic element,
because he's not thinking in gallery terms.
I prefer James, frankly, because that combination is richer.
It was a lot of fun to photograph people in my apartment,
because they were always surprised
by the threadbare environment.
That was in my apartment. This was in my apartment.
I love that.
Beastie Boys.
This was an assignment for Vanity Fair,
having lunch with Liberace.
Lunch with Liberace.
Lunch, that was...
Raise your hand if you've had lunch with Liberace.
A lot of them interested me
much more than just being celebrities.
A lot of them I cared so much about their work,
not particularly their image.
I wanted them to be portrayed the way I wanted to see them,
wanted a stranger to know something about them.
Besides Joni Mitchell, there were only two occasions
where I was photographed with a subject.
One was I went with Jamaica Kincaid
to do an interview with Salvador Dali,
and she photographed me with him.
I set up the camera.
And then that picture of Godard and me on the balcony.
He was very nervous about being so high up,
so I stood next to him,
and he felt a little more comfortable.
And Godard and Kurosawa a meeting for the first time.
They're almost identically dressed.
And I didn't ask them to pose at all.
I just said, "Stand over by the window."
And they both did this with their hands.
We were told one day that Jared Kushner
was gonna buy the paper.
I wasn't in on the inner workings
of the office at all, really,
and I didn't know how much it was gonna change.
And at first it didn't change very much.
But then it just slowly turned
into this kind of a business paper.
This guy had come in, Kushner, and bought the paper
for reasons that were extraneous to journalism.
He had no real interest in journalism,
didn't know anything about it, didn't really care about it,
which meant that everything that was good about the paper
was going to disappear.
He wanted to create a narrative about his family,
because his father had just gotten out of prison.
I think Peter was optimistic at first,
and Peter's innovation was, quite boldly,
he decided he was gonna make The Observer
into a tabloid rather than a broadsheet.
The New York Post, that was what Jared admired and knew.
Jared was also very alert to sites like Gawker.
He wanted shorter articles.
So Peter, he really rallied. He made it into a tabloid.
I was photographing a lot of business people
and real estate people.
I was still doing a portrait a week of anyone I wanted.
But it was becoming way less interesting
because of the way the paper had turned.
Who left first? You or me?
I can't remember who left first.
Well, I got run over, so that was...
I was hanging around for the money, and it wasn't much.
Threatens to feel like a metaphor
for print journalism in general.
Well, you could certainly look at it that way.
People don't remember it.
When I go and talk to young journalism students now,
they have no idea what I'm talking about.
It was just something in the moment.
That's sort of what journalism is.
A lot of journalism doesn't hold up.
That's not what journalism does.
It's the first draft of history.
It could be a really good first draft,
but it's not meant to last.
And James' photographs,
those are gonna last in a different way.
So this is where it happened.
I was walking down Montague
to photograph her Corcoran real estate office here.
I stepped off the curb.
Cadillac Escalade hit me from behind. I went down.
And the wheel stopped right here on my leg.
And the wheel of the Cadillac Escalade is about that wide
and separated my foot from my leg structurally.
And so I was lying in the street,
and my very first thought was,
"Thank God I never have to work at The Observer again."
That's how bad things had got.
My second thought was, "I hope I don't have a limp."
And it was four separate surgeries.
It was very tough on both of us.
We were living on credit cards very much for the whole time.
The only really fortunate thing about that accident
was worker's comp kicked in.
And if that hadn't happened,
we would've had to sell this place.
This was the end of my journalism career.
I certainly couldn't work for all those years
that I was laid up.
It was a bad time for journalists everywhere,
and this was '09.
And it hasn't gotten any better since.
It's continued to be bad. In fact, it's gotten worse.
When I started,
we didn't even let the ad people on our floor.
It was like church and state, edit and advertising.
And by the time I left, people were doing stories
in order to get the advertising.
It's like, why even do it?
How could you say what you really wanna say
if an advertiser's gonna be offended?
They started shortening all of the stories,
and I don't think it's necessarily
because people no longer read long pieces,
but that's what we were told.
By the way, if you're a freelancer, you get paid per word.
People ask me to freelance all the time,
sometimes for no money whatsoever.
But definitely they gave me these per-word rates
that were unbelievable.
"What do you mean 10 cents a word?"
It's just like, "What can I do with that?"
The overwhelm of text and image,
the economics of it don't work.
If there's so much text,
then of course the price of it is gonna go down,
the quality is gonna suffer.
We were so lucky to work during the times that we did.
The kind of leeway we had to totally tell the story.
You didn't even have the internet.
There was no reporting by reading back then.
Reporting was shoe leather.
There are people right now who are 18, 20, 22 years old
who want to do exactly what it is that we did.
They wanna tell stories.
They wanna go deep into a subject.
They wanna photograph the hell outta something.
They've got all the talent and all the hunger in the world.
And where is it for them?
Are we gonna get to the point
where nobody tells these stories,
nobody reads them, they don't exist?
I don't know, 'cause I don't know where they will exist.
For a lot of us, we were never gonna do anything else.
I didn't have an alternate career.
I never even thought about something else to do.
This was the only thing that you were gonna do,
and it was make it or break.
Yeah. Yeah.
What do you do with it all
at the end of the day?
What do you do with it all?
Yeah,
We bury it with us, like the pharaohs.
I have a system, but I'm not keeping up with it.
And there was no time,
because that was the middle of our life, when we were busy.
I had a home. I had a child.
I just did what I had to do,
and there are all these pictures that are...
Just sitting on contact sheets.
They're sitting on contact sheets and screaming.
That's true.
Saying, "I'm here! Take me out!"
That's true. And there's just no time.
I think once you had a pause,
you realized that you had this giant body of work
that you had to start looking at and cataloging
and thinking about where it's gonna go.
That's what I did.
I went through my archives to sort things out.
And it gave me time to do the musician's book,
which I probably never would've had the time to do.
James has these physical objects, these souvenirs,
that is the preservation of half a century or more
of New York City's greatest moment, grittiest moment.
And right now they're all just sitting in boxes.
They're not in a stock agency,
this gold mine of 65 years of New York City.
Not yet.
55 years.
55.
He'd always just wanted to do what he wanted to do,
and he didn't really care about fame.
I don't think he would've turned it down,
but it wasn't like he got an agent
or he was seeking out big jobs or anything like that.
You have to be really creative and entrepreneurial
to succeed with photography now.
But he's anti-entrepreneurial
James's work, it's refreshingly devoid of ego.
Let's put it that way.
During the internet age,
where a lot of photographers were disseminating their work
into the public sphere,
James' work was just like not seen at all.
Your social life got in the way
of becoming an art star.
My hedonism got in the way everything.
It totally did.
My whole career was all about having fun, I have to say.
I wasn't interested in putting pictures on walls.
I was interested in doing the next thing.
Like many pictures that James took,
like the pictures in China,
like some of the pictures in the Philippines,
he should have won a Pulitzer Prize.
For the presser picture,
it became a really important photograph,
because it so captured the kind of corrupt essence
of the teamsters and their leadership.
What we came away with was the satisfaction
of doing the work, which was great.
- More than great. - More than great.
But some of those pictures deserve recognition
they did not get.
James really is a treasure, I think.
And beyond his work, also, is his approach to his work.
That is a very pure way to approach what you do
and who you are.
And you think of all the things
that are in such short supply these days:
value, actual value, honesty,
and, coupled with that, integrity
and a kind of sense of fun.
James, he likes being alive.
He likes seeing life around him. He likes looking at it.
He likes feeling it. He likes investigating it.
He likes being on a story.
And whatever the story,
he goes with that same seriousness, intensity.
And he's not looking to just grab shit.
He's not looking to get an image, sell an image.
He's looking to find, refine.
He's a good person to have still around in this age.
The Voice is gone,
but James Hamilton is still out there.
I'm always being reminded of films.
I think about films a lot.
Films in my past and my history.
Because they were very important to me.
And I can take myself back to being in the theater, even,
when I first saw a film.
I mean, they're anchors for memories, which I love.
I always thought I was either gonna be a painter
or a filmmaker when I was young.
But I was never technological.
I never owned a camera.
And then the idea of doing film intimidated me too,
because I was not a writer,
and I always thought that I would have to write
whatever I filmed.
And again, the technology and working with a lot of people.
It was not until I worked on movie sets
that I really saw the most fun job as the director,
but also the most challenging, intimidating,
and the farthest away from the way I am,
which is working alone.
And then, when I did finally buy a camera
and started shooting, I just was totally content
with the moment and stories made up of moments.
So I didn't really feel like I needed
to pick up a video camera or get a movie camera.
I loved the still.