Photograph © Cacy Forgenie
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I met Cacy Forgenie back when he worked at Mass Appeal, and though it’s been years since we’ve last spoke, it’s amazing how easy it is to resume the conversation mid flow. On September 11, “Jaded” a collection of Cacy’s photos, opens at Chi Chiz, 135 Christopher Street. The moment I saw these photos, I had all sorts of questions for him. Check it out…
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This collection of work is called “Jaded” which resonates strongly with me as a New Yorker. Why did you select this title to accompany these scenes of disaster, distress, and mayhem ?
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When I was approached to do the show a few months ago I was prepared to show images that I thought corresponded with the space and what being in that space, a bar frequented by intergenerational black, gay or bi-sexual men of different socio-economic backgrounds, implied: escape and desire. After some discussion with my partner, I realized that the folks who frequent Chi Chiz are probably people who have seen it or done it all in regards to sex and eroticism in NYC and New Jersey.
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I decided to show images of a type of experience that may have been internalized but not necessarily discussed: violence, harassment and police terror, things and experience that may retard compassion. I thought it would be too conventional to show things like a sex act or an implied sex act, to people who were so sophisticated. Very few people have seen my disaster photographs in New York outside of newspapers and magazines and galleries in Chelsea. I wanted a new audience, and I wanted to infuse a sense of recognition and compassion in the space. I wanted to build a type of solidarity from our shared experiences as black men becoming numb by the things we witnessed and experienced. I wanted to say this is what we’re not talking about with each other in this space.
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Photograph © Cacy Forgenie
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Were these images you consciously sought out, or were they something, that over time, you realized were a collection unto themselves ?
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I don’t seek these images, I stumble upon them. If something is in progress I run towards it, I chase it.
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One of my earliest supporters was Derrick Adams. He saw something that I didn’t really pay much attention to because photographing mayhem had become ordinary for me. It was normal for me to walk out of my apt and see someone with a gunshot wound. It was normal for me to cross Atlantic Avenue and see a body in the middle of the road. It was normal for me to see a car crash. I would just “run into things” or have something, like the police car crash pointed out Carmen Hammons, pointed to me. 9 out of 10 times, I happen on the scene intuitively or unconsciously. My only Control is the camera I have and how I chose to compose the image. Whenever I would photograph something crazy, I’d ring up Derrick and say, “Guess what I photographed today!”
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Back in 2007-2008 I was nominated for a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award and Derrick suggested I show these images to them and also at The RUSH ARTS Gallery Project Space. I knew the images were there but I didn’t think about organizing them in this way. Originally, I imagined publishing them in a book alongside my photographs of rappers, models and actors partying in NYC and Miami.
Photograph © Cacy Forgenie
Why do you think it is we “enjoy” looking at photographs like these?
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Danger is exciting from a distance, and looking at images like these offers us a thrill and a wonder. They’re like mini-horror movies, some of these images are. Some of them make your heart race. Theres also an aspect of nostalgia, especially as a New Yorker because you remember a kinetic NY before 9/11 happened.
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I am particularly struck by the photo of the cab on fire. Please talk about what is happening in that image.
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I call it “The Fire Next Time” because it makes me think about the James Baldwin book and the Jim Crow stuff black people, black men, deal with trying to get around NYC in cabs.
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There are many frames of this event but I chose to print this frame because of the nonchalance of NYers on the sidewalk: they didn’t care too much. I photographed that image with a Kodak Disposable Camera. I think I was living in Queens or in The Bronx in 1999, and I was a year and a half back from living in the UK, trying to break into the NYC magazine market while simultaneously trying to launch a fashion magazine called IFF with a girl from Denmark that Summer. We’d finished a meeting and I was on my way to B&H to look at cameras. At this time I was using a Polaroid SX-70 Alpha and an broken Olympus Stylus Zoom. The Polaroid was a burden to carry and the Olympus was useless. Some photographer friends suggested I graduate to a larger format and try studio work so I was off to B&H to look at used Hassleblads.
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As I am walking up 8th Avenue I see smoke. Curious, I run toward the smoke and there it was. I didn’t have a camera so I looked for, and found, a newsstand and bought a disposable and started photographing the scene from the middle of 8th Avenue until I got close to the flames which were on 34th Street. Disposables have fixed lenses. If I wanted a better picture I would have to get closer and thats what I did. To get close to the cab I had to hop a barricade that was part of a street construction site blocking 34th Street. And as I am running and jumping I can feel this surge of energy course through me. My heart is thumping wildly and I could feel the heat kissing my face.This might sound corny but I am an Aries, a fire element, and I am not afraid of fire. In fact Cacy means brave in Gaelic. It sounds all kinds of wrong but fire and I are OK.
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Getting the picture was thrilling but around me, people were afraid for me, they thought the cab would explode, they thought I would be burned or choke from the smoke. I had to get the picture. It was the first time I felt pleasure photographing a disaster. As for why the cab was on fire, it was the engine. It burst into flames. The driver left the scene before the cops came. I saw him take his stuff and walk away. I stayed and photographed everything I could, until there was nothing left for the fire to burn. All that was left was a steel frame on the corner of 34th & 8th.
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Why did you decide to include photographs from 9/11 in this series ? How do you think we as New Yorkers now frame 9/11 as part of our experience in this city?
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When 9/11 happened, I was contributing to an Italian hip hop magazine based in Milan. The editor called to check up on me on the day I decided to stop photographing Ground Zero. As I was describing what I saw to her, I burst into tears. I was on auto pilot until then. Recounting what I saw helped me I realize what happened. It was weird. I must have tucked myself away during the photographic process because I wasn’t grieving while there. And I chose to be there.
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I was in bed in the Bronx, listening to Howard Stern when Howard announced that a plane had crashed into one of the Towers. I got out of bed, hopped in the shower, got dressed, caught the D before service ended at 59th Street, hopped on a bus to Times Square, ran from Times Square to Lower Manhattan via the West Side Highway, stood on what was a Tower and photographed what I saw. For hours and hours. And I did the same thing the next day until I had enough.
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I wanted to show bodies in distress, experiencing trauma or in recovery in Jaded. And even tho I spent about two and a half days photographing Ground Zero, I didn’t have those images explicitly. Those photographs have phantoms. I try to limit my inclusion of those images when doing projects because I am not comfortable looking at them. 9/11 was both a psychic and physical disturbance.
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During our studio visit I showed the curator a proof of a book I was working on; it had just two images from that time. He’d also saw a print (one of the two) from my LIVE! From New York show at RUSH and thought they would work well together. It an unconscious assemblage of time and image, really. Fate. After we nailed the date and the time for the show, I realized that images from 9/11 will be shown on 9/11, the show’s opening date. This is the first time this has happened within my control. The Associated Press had a show in 9/11/02 with one or two of my photographs and the BBC had something, too. It’s on my CV but I didn’t actively participate in their shows or even know about it until years later.
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Do they work in the show? I think they do. Theres a series of scales happening in those images. There’s the scale of what was captured, the scale of what’s missing, the scale of time, and the scale of what we are doing to cope with what has happened. People have fled my shows in tears when they encounter these image.
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9/11 is what we think of whenever something unexpected happens in the city, something loud like a manhole cover blowing up, a building collapsing, a plane flying low or a crane toppling. Its altered our consciousness to what was once a normalcy within the boundaries of a metropolis. I think NYers were hyper-terrorized by 9/11.
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