Posts from the “1970s” Category

Scott Nichols Gallery: It’s Only Rock and Roll

Posted on August 26, 2015

Photo: Baron Wolman, Jimmy Hendrix with Guitar, 1968

Photo: Andy Freeberg, BB King at Montreux, 1980

The late, great B.B. King observed, “Playing the guitar is like telling the truth—you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.”

King lived his life in this truth and gave this truth to the world. He who had said, “I never use that word, retire,” continued to play live performances until just months before his death, earlier this year, at 89 years old. King, one of the greatest blues musicians of our times, showing us that music is not just in your blood, it is in your soul. He understood the power of music to bring people together, to reach them in a way that nothing else could. He sagely advised, “You only live but once, and when your died your done, so let the good times roll,” and he set those words to song.

We feel his joy, long after he is gone, not just in his music but in the photographs taken of him throughout the years. “I want to connect my guitar to human emotions,” King said, and we are reminded of the power of his intention when gazing upon Andy Freeberg’s photograph of BB King at Montreux, 1980, which is currently on view in the group show It’s Only Rock and Roll, on view at Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, now through September 16, 2015.

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Meryl Meisler: Purgatory & Paradise

Posted on August 1, 2015

Plaid Suit and Cadillac in Chelsea, NY, NY, May 1978.

The 1970s was an age of innocent decadence, the time before the fall, a time where the country cracked open and out of it came creatures with big hair and vibrant personality, the kind of characters that have that old school je ne sais quoi that makes their shenanigans a delight to watch.

Take Judi Jupiter as she weighs the situation in the new book by Meryl Meisler, Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY ‘70s Suburbia & The City (Bizarre Publishing). It was July 1977, Westhampton, NY, and Miss Jupiter was taking her top off as she weighed big nuggets of weed on a triple beam balance scale. She looks at the camera through a thicket of bangs all but obscuring her eyes. She’s but one of hundreds of subjects Meisler came upon in her travels across Long Island and NYC, subjects that were outrageously stylish and sexy.

As Meisler writes in the introduction, “This book encapsulates my coming of age: The Bronx, suburbia, The Mystery Club, dance lessons, Girl Scouts, the Rockettes, the circus, school, mitzvahs, proms, feminism, Disco, Go-Go, Jewish and LGBT Pride, the New York streets, friendship, family and love. I had to photograph it to make sense of it all. To hold onto the time, to release and share it, to put it in perspective and move on. It was sassy, but also sweet, and so was I.”

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE

Judi Jupiter Weighs the Situation, Westhampton, NY, July 1977.

Street Ventriloquist, NY, NY, July 1979.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Christopher Makos: White Trash Uncut

Posted on July 30, 2015

Debbie Harry. Photo by Christopher Makos

New York, 1977. It began with a book, a paperback with black and white photographs of the punk scene. The book was titled White Trash and it featured the boldest of the boldface names: Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, Halston, Andy Warhol, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Divine, and John Waters. Add to that a splash of Man Ray, Tennessee Williams, and Marilyn Chambers, and you’ve nailed it. White Trash, Christopher Makos’ photography book, is the place where pop meets pulp, perfectly defining the D.I.Y. ethos of the times. The book has become a seminal volume of the times and now sells for upwards of $500.

However, the original edition is a paperback, and paperbacks are not designed to last. They’re disposable (like, say, white trash). And if you crack the spine too wide, the entire thing might fall apart in your hands. We are fortunate, then, that Glitterati Incorporated has released a revised and expanded edition in hardcover.

White Trash Uncut, Makos’ updated monograph, is a lavish affair. This tall, slim volume features the photographs uncropped (unlike the 1977 edition). It also features a selection of never-before-published photographs of Grace Jones, among others. Included throughout the book is the use of silver, making the pages come alive. Everything about the book is luxurious, and in that way it becomes a statement of the times. Punk has passed; that New York is long gone. But what lives in its place are photographs, memories, and stories.

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE

David Croland and Grace Jones wearing a Le Jardin shirt. New York. Photo by Chrostopher Makos

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Fashion, Manhattan, Photography

Arlene Gottfried: Mommie

Posted on July 3, 2015

Photograph by Arlene Gottfried

Photographs by Arlene Gottfried

Last summer I had the great pleasure of speaking with Arlene Gottfried at length, well, listening mostly, listening and asking questions and then listening again as Arlene spoke of her life behind the camera. A second generation New Yorker, Arlene has born witness to the people that have made this city one of the greatest places on earth. Her photographs never fail to delight and astound with their distinctive blend of compassion, style, and grace, with a knowing nod, a giggle, and a wink. This is New York, after all.

Arlene is unassuming yet powerful. The intensity of her presence can best be felt when looking at her photograph or listening to her sing gospel. I remember hearing her in church on several occasions, overwhelmed and overjoyed by the spirit she channels. It is this spirit, this very soul, that makes Arlene one of the most compelling artists I know. And so it was with great honor that last summer I interviewed Arlene about her life, her family, and her work for her forthcoming book, Mommie (powerHouse Books).

I remember seeing the mock up for Mommie at powerHouse years ago, once again overwhelmed by the depth and profundity of her work. To be honest, I was not ready for this level of truth, this intense bond between generations of women, all flowers from the same root. Mommie is Arlene’s fourth book with powerHouse, and perhaps the most personal of an incredibly intimate body of work.

As I listened to Arlene speak, I realized she was a woman who has kept a great many private matters just so, and with Mommie she was sharing more than her memories, she was baring witness as the family historian. As time passes, we come to terms with the eternal circle of life and death and birth once more. With Mommie, we quietly observe, we feel, and we think; Arlene’s photographs have the cumulative effect of softly sinking into your body and changing the very nature of your being.

In that same way, the book is an object unto itself, an object to be held, much like a family album. powerHouse would like to use real upholstery fabric to wrap the book’s boards (the front cover, spine, and back cover) and has decided to create a Indie GoGo account to support the production costs. In order to share Arlene’s story, they asked me to interview her a couple of months ago, and this time, Arlene sang “Amazing Grace,” a moment that be stilled my soul.

The video is now live, and the Indie GoGo campaign has begun. We invite you to visit the campaign at MOMMIE, and support the project. Among the rewards offered are Arlene’s first three powerHouse Books: Bacalaitos & Fireworks, Midnight, and Sometimes Overwhelming, each one a treasury of New York City history, street photography, and style, each one a love letter from the bottom of her heart.

Photograph by Arlene Gottfried

Photograph by Arlene Gottfried

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Manhattan, Photography, Women

Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Record Covers 1949-1987

Posted on July 1, 2015

Melodic Magic, Vol 1, 1953. All images © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The album cover is an icon of the past, of an age when vinyl was something to be collected. The 12 x 12 inch surface was a canvas ripe for exploration, the square format offering infinite interpretations. The album cover, such as it was, provided a space for the artist to put us in the mood, to seduce us with images, words, ideas. It offered a space for contemplation, as the record spun round, creating a delicious interplay between audio and visual experience of the work. As a result, album covers, in certain cases, have become icons themselves.

ndy Warhol designed his first record cover in 1949; clearly he sensed the value of the medium, for he launched his career phoning record companies and soliciting them. Over the years, until his death in 1987, he created more than fifty covers which are presented beautifully in Andy Warhol: The Complete Commissioned Record Covers 1949-1987, Catalogue Raisonné, 2nd Edition by Paul Maréchal (Prestel). Produced at nearly actual size, with photographs of the original works, along with entries detailing the story of each album, this catalogue is a compendium of sumptuous delight.

Warhol’s gift for blurring the lines between high and low art and be felt in each and every illustration he created. His best known works, the covers of The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967) and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers (1971), appear alongside lesser known works such as Monk featuring Thelonious Monk with Sonny Rollins and Frank Foster (1954) Giant Size $1.57 Each, released in conjunction with the exhibition The Popular Image at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art (1963). Taken together as a group, we can follow the thread of Warhol’s transformation from illustrator to artist, his visual vocabulary becoming more exact and extreme as his ideas take hold.

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE

Monk, 1954. All images © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Manhattan, Music

Fresh Dressed: Directed by Sacha Jenkins

Posted on June 29, 2015

CNN Films: Fresh Dressed- Classic street style; Brooklyn New York, circa 1986.
Photograph by Jamel Shabazz

“Being fresh is more important than having money. I only wanted money so I could be fresh,” Kanye West says with the utmost conviction. Dressed in all white, Kanye is sitting in on the deck of a beach house, somewhere where the skies are blue and the water is clean, and drops bon mots like this for the camera. Yeezy is just one of the many moguls, masterminds, and pioneers in Sacha Jenkins’ documentary film, Fresh Dressed, which premiered at the SVA Theater, New York, on June 18 and releases nationwide on June 26, 2015.

The theater was a who’s who of legends who created the form of Hip Hop that took the world by storm. As KRS-One said, “Rap is something you do. Hip Hop is something you live.” This way of being was very much in evidence in the crowd, filled with the artists, musicians, and designers who have defined Hip Hop style. It was a veritable who’s who of fashion visionaries including Dapper Dan, Karl Kani, Mark Ecko, April Walker, Shirt King Phade, and Jorge Fabel Pabon, among others, people who revolutionized the look, feel, and availability of mainstream apparel as well as couture pieces.

Nasir Jones, executive producer of the film, was sitting in the audience as Sacha Jenkins took the stage before the screening began to welcome the audience and say a few words. Wearing a Public School shorts-suit, bow tie, and plaid shirt with red kicks, Jenkins was handed the mic and asked, “You know my first question, right? Is Queens in the house?” The call was answered enthusiastically by the audience. Jenkins did roll call, then he broke it down, introducing Nas by saying, “He went to the same shitty junior high school as I did…The guidance counselors told me the best way to make it in life was vocational jobs. None had any expectations of us.”

Read the Full Story at CRAVE

CNN Films: Fresh Dressed- The jean jacket was graffiti art’s first canvas. B boys on the street, Brooklyn circa 1983
Photograph by Jamel Shabazz

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

The Way We Wore: Black Style Then

Posted on June 19, 2015

1978, Newark, New Jersey. Douglas Says.

Style is a statement of individuality, of identity, and of pride. Style is the great art of living manifest by our desire to beautify, to adorn, and to express a great inner being in tangible form. Style most readily finds itself expressed through fashion, hair, and makeup, though it is also evident in the very act of documenting one’s self. To have style is to give unto the world, to share it not only in the present tense but to capture it for future generations to enjoy.

In The Way We Wore: Black Style Then (Glitterati Incorporated), Michael McCollom chronicles African-Americans fashion from the 1940s through today. Featuring snapshots of over 150 black men and women’s most unforgettable “style moments”, The Way We Wore includes personal photographs taken from the author’s own family and circle of friends, a circle of 100 fashion insiders, outsiders, and beautiful people that includes Oprah Winfrey, James Baldwin, Carmen de Lavallade, Iman, Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, Tracy Reese, Patrick Kelly, Kimora Lee, Bobby Short, Bethann Hardison, Tookie Smith, and Portia LaBeija, among others.

The late, great Geoffrey Holder eloquently observes in the book’s foreword, “One should not enter a room and expect ambiance; one should enter a room and become it. Those that grace the pages of The Way We Wore took that concept and ran with it. Through the reader will witness the evolution—and, in some cases, the faux pas—of fashion and design, it is in the personal flair that an individual bestows to each outfit that creates the look…. Like a yearbook, you will come back to this work again and again. Though you may not know the people personally, you will recognize them. Michael has carefully chosen pictures and people that exhibit the historical framework of African-American influence on fashion, design, and culture.”

Read the Full Story at CRAVE ONLINE

1978, Newark, New Jersey. Linwood Allen, Designer.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Peter Mishara: Bronx 79

Posted on February 11, 2015

Bronx 79. I remember it well. Diana Vreeland once said something to the effect of the first five years of your life influence your sensibility and your taste because the world makes a powerful impression on your soul. It is those early years, when you are just navigating the world, that time and place are one and the same. This is style, in the truest sense of the word. Who What Where When Why & How? That’s what it’s all about.

Bronx 79, that’s where Peter Mishara comes in, with a trailer of the same name that you can view HERE. It takes us back into time, to a world so long ago that all that remains are the photographs, the footage, and the people who lived to tell.

Miss Rosen: What was the inspiration for Bronx 79 ? What made you decide to develop a documentary film to explore this place in time ? What are some of the ideas and themes that you are exploring in the film ?

Peter Mishara: Quite simply, Bronx 79 grew out of a lifelong love of the music and the culture. Hip-hop has been some part of my life from a very young age and something that has grown with me as I have and has connected me to people and places and experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. The interest to me was twofold – one, I was born in NYC in 1976 and I’ve always grappled with the sense of nostalgia that I have for that era, not of my own specific memories but more of a time and place that is no longer. And two, even when I was a young kid listening to EMPD and Slick Rick and the like I still was curious to the origins of the culture – who were these cats that came before? So stuff like Crash Crew and Flash were getting a lot of play in my Walkman. My first screenplay that I ever wrote was a short film based on a Masta Ace story (with his blessing of course) that appeared in a 1993 issue of the Source called “Sleeping Snakes” which was about graffiti writers in the early 80s. In ’98 I turned it into my senior thesis at Temple University when I went there for undergrad (a trailer is HERE). In any event, my desire to accurately portray this era on film has been with me a long while.

This is the main idea that I want to explore – you’ve got a culture that was effectively on its own for almost 6 years, from ’73 to ’79, with its own constellation of stars, artists all within a 50 block or so radius. In today’s hyperconnected world, that’s an impossibility – that shit would be on Twitter tomorrow and by the end of the week be played out, but again we’re talking 6 years here – crazy, and not to mention set against the backdrop of one of the single greatest collapses of urban infrastructure in the modern history of the world. Its become cliché to say nowadays, but people forget how much NYC was in freefall at the time and there was serious consideration that it might not ever recover. All that to say that these kids were not expected to make any contribution to larger society, quite the opposite, they were in many ways abandoned and forgotten. Instead of being forgotten however, they laid the foundation to the greatest youth movement of the past 40 years. So they’ve got six years to cook the culture, let it percolate and establish rules and style. Then boom, this one 12” comes out – Rappers Delight – and changes everything. Literally, its BRD and ARD in hip-hop history – what does that mean to the constellation of stars and fans? Its almost like the introduction of sound in film, you’ve got some talent that’s able to make the switch, but a lot aren’t able to, and just like silent film, you’ve got a lot of those amazing pieces of art that are lost to time. That’s what compels me about this and what I want to explore in Bronx 79.

Who are the subjects who will be featured in the film ? What made you select them ? What expertise does each of them bring to the story?

In this proof-of-concept trailer, you’ve got 3 people interviewed – two people that were there at the beginnings, DJ Disco Wiz and Joe Conzo and a journalist, Jeff Chang to help give a little context. All three were incredible talents and I was lucky (with the help of a certain Miss Rosen) to get them on screen. Wiz wrote the amazing memoir It’s Just Begun (which served as inspiration for the main music choice of the trailer), and one of the things that’s fascinating about him is that during “BRD” he went upstate to do a bid and he missed the actual shift that the culture experienced, so that the change for him when he got back home was far more palatable. Joe is an incredible dude, just a kid when he took these pictures that would be some of the only records of this era and talking to him you can still see that same guy in there somewhere. The way he talks about that time you just feel like that you’re there with him. And Jeff was fantastic just in terms of his research and his knowledge of this specific time and place. I was very lucky to interview them as the basis for this trailer.

I do have a rather extensive wish-list of people that I’d love to get on film. Of course the “holy trinity” of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash. You’ve got musicians such as Grandmaster Caz, The Furious Five, Charlie Chase, Kurtis Blow, Sha Rock, Buzy Bee Starski, Melle Mel, the list goes on and definitely talk to the cats that were on the front lines of this seismic shift – the Sugarhill Gang (RIP Big Hank Bank). If I could be quite honest, my biggest issue with the proof-of-concept trailer as it is, is that it doesn’t include any b-boying or graff, this is not an oversight, just a factor of production limitations. So that being said, b-boys such as Crazy Legs, Ken Swift, Jimmy D, Lenny Len, Chino “Action” Lopez, Popmaster Fabel, etc. And graff artists Lee, Lady Pink, Futura, Zephyr, T-Kid, Seen, Phase II just to name a very few. As a side note, its pretty interesting that what is considered the core “pillars” of hip-hop started out separately from one another and became inextricably linked in hindsight, but this is an element that would be worth exploring more. And finally, I’d like to interview people from that time that aren’t “names” but were avid fans of the scene. Jeff Chang has a great passage in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop with Cindy Campbell, sister of Kool Herc, whose desire for a new wardrobe for going back to school was the impetus for what is widely considered the first hip-hop jam in 1973. I’d love to interview people such as her to get a completely different perspective on what that world was actually like.

I love the original footage and photographs included in the film. What were some of the challenges in sourcing authentic materials from the era ?

The challenge is that there isn’t any! Well, that might be going a bit far, but the reality is that actual archival footage from that time is very few and very far between. First and foremost, Joe Conzo allowing me to use his photographs was huge – they are pretty much the only document from that era that directly shows that scene. The other first degree archival footage exists as personal photographs and in rare instances Super 8mm film, all of which I’d love to feature.

The other main resource is either a handful of narrative films and a few documentaries. The internet obviously is a great resource in terms of listing the films, but almost anything online is horrible quality. I strove for highest quality as possible, and I’ve been collecting DVDs for the past decade or so to pull from. What is exciting is that these movies, such as Fort Apache, the Bronx and Wolfen were shot on film and could be potentially uprezzed to HD, a possibility which is completely dependent on availability and cost. There’s a great blog run by filmmaker Jonathan Hertzberg (http://knifeinthehead.blogspot.ca/) where he creates these supercuts of what he terms “Dirty Old New York” which was an invaluable resource.

The challenge is a great one to have and forces you to find new ways to show what it was actually like then. In an ideal world, I’d like to bring to life some of these stories either through animation (Vaughn Bode and particularly Ralph Bakshi’s Coonskin are huge influences) or through live-action recreations. Both techniques should feel like a modern interpretation of era specific styles, meaning they should feel like a time capsule of the ’70s.

What are your plans for developing a longer length film?

Great question. On one hand, the proof-of-concept trailer were some ideas that I’ve had in my head for a long time and eventually I just wanted to get them out in the world. From that perspective, the experience has been invaluable in terms of allowing me to focus on what works and what doesn’t. For me, it comes down to storytelling – people that were there and lived it and through their stories are able to take you back to that time. There tends to be a romanticizing of what New York was like back then which doesn’t interest me. That’s why I started the trailer with Wiz’s great quote, “This wasn’t like no love pow-wow, this was the streets.” So basically I want to hear more of these stories, get them on film and take it from there.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Bronx, Music, Photography

Richard Verdi: New York Punk

Posted on May 2, 2014

Back in the 1970s when New York teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, a new world was being born, a world of Do It Yourself (cause if it ain’t you, it might never be). It was during this time that Richard Verdi went out every night going with his friends to catch live music shows at CBGB’s. Verdi has just released his book, New York Punk, self-published, because that’s what D.I.Y. means. New York Punk is a charming number, like the paperback photography books of the 70s, the collections of printed matter done in small editions and halftone printing. Paper and ink, bound in hand, pages turning one after another, a story of how we lived then.

Verdi’s photographs are from a time before video killed the radio star, from a time before any of these artists were on the radio, when they were still at the clubs doing shows for the crowds. Style is everything, and it is here in high contrast black and white. It is where it all began, an aesthetic of destruction distinctly American. New Yorker to be exact. This is downtown when it was underground and more people were none the wiser to what would come next.

Read the Full Story at
L’Oeil de la Photographie

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Posted on March 6, 2014

Black Panther Party headquarters, Harlem.

It began as a series of interviews, of films made, of speeches taped, of conversations, ideas, people. It began when Swedes began sending journalists out into the world, and those that came to the United States were attracted to the civil rights and black power movements of the 60s and the 70s. They had access, and they had nerve, and they never shied away from asking uncomfortable questions, because they could. And what became of these moments caught on film forty, fifty years ago, was first a documentary film, and now a paperback book titled, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 by Göran Hugo Olsson (Haymarket Books).

The book and film feature vintage footage made available for commentary by contemporary artists and intellectuals invoking nothing so beautiful as a tapestry, a fabric that weaves together the past and the present, the ancestors, the heirs, and our shared inheritance. For what this era begat was nothing short of fearless, of an unstoppable force in the face of one of the most treacherous regimes known to humanity.

Attica Prison, Attica, New York, 1972.

The book is an expansion of the film, charting the course of the Black Power movement as a natural outgrowth of Civil Rights, charting the course of both movements that spoke truth to power. It was the American Revolution, this time from within, a period of resistance and rebellion sparked by the eternal flame of freedom and self determination, the very things that the United States had been founded upon, but denied the people it kidnapped and enslaved from the continent of Africa.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 takes us back to a time and a place where standing against the system was to stand in one’s integrity. It was to refuse to surrender, to submit, to be complicit in the exploitation of the status quo to line the pockets of the rich. It was a statement against the propaganda that projected the crimes of the oppressor onto the oppressed, and tells the truth about a time when the Truth refused to be silenced.

Beautifully illustrated with photographs taken during the filming of the video reels, the book includes transcripts from historical speeches and interviews with Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Emile de Antonio, and Angela Davis. Offering a contemporary counterpoint to the vintage footage is commentary by Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Kathleen Cleaver, D.G. Kelley, Abiodun Oyewole, Sonia Sanchez, John Forte, and Questlove.

Stokely Carmichael with his mother, Mabel Carmichael, at her home in the Bronx, 1967.

The photographs are as raw and vital as the words themselves. With on pretense to being fine art, they do what photojournalism does best: give us a face for the disembodied voice that thunders across the page, the words we read with our eyes while they echo in our ears. We see the people whose words and ideas changed the course of the political landscape, forever burning bright in the sky, stars all one and the same. Whether it is a snapshot of a kid challenging the police in Brooklyn in 1968, taken from the vantage point of standing behind the cop’s right shoulder or a shot of King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, Dr. King, Harry Belanfonte, Coretta Scott King, and Gunnar Myrdal on the occasion of the awarding of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, we begin to see how it is, from the streets, staring down the opposition, a people rise.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 deftly charts the course of the movement, its highs and lows, and ultimate demise at the hands of the U.S. government. But the book does not leave us bereft, for it ends on a note of faith, hope, and love, honoring those who came before and the legacy they built, the freedoms they won, that which we have all inherited and are charged to uphold.

First published at L’Oeil de la Photographie
March 6, 2014

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Books, Photography

Nat Finkelstein: Where the Underground Met the Underworld

Posted on October 1, 2013

Edie Sedgwick & Nat Finkelstein © Stephen Shore

A cat like Nat Finkelstein had nine lives before he died in 2009. A photographer, journalist, world traveler, animal smuggler, gun runner, drug dealer, ex-convict, revolutionary, and only God (and Nat) knows what else. Born in 1933 in Coney Island, Finkelstein studied with Alexey Brodovich at Brooklyn College before joining Pix and Black Star agencies before leaving the United States in 1969 to escape the Feds.

Possessed with blessings and curses in equal measure, Nat was drawn to the underground—and the underworld. As his memoirs recollect, “I am an anarchist and believe in the overthrow of Capitalism. I am studied and trained. I know that revolutionary victories are achieved through preparation, organization, stealth, and subterfuge, followed by violence only when victory is assured. I also believe in Lenin’s dictum that the problem with the bourgeois revolutionary is that the bourgeois revolutionary always believes that the STAGE of revolution in which they are participating is The Revolution. This accounts for my antipathy to certain insurrectionists (Hoffman, Ginsberg, et al) of the late 60s and early 70s.”

Never a follower, Nat set his own path, with New York City as his base of operations. His iconoclastic disposition landed him at Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1964 while on assignment from Black Star. With unfettered access to the creation of art, film, and Superstars, his documentation of the earliest years of the Factory reveal a scene that has influenced New York’s downtown identity ever since. The glamour of Hollywood with the grittiness of New York conspired to create Pop Art as a way of life.

In his superb book, Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967, Nat recalled, “Andy Warhol’s greatest work of art was Andy Warhol. Other artists first make their art and then celebrity comes from it. Andy reversed this. For me the Factory was a place of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, for some of the others it was: from ferment comes art.

“Andy’s strategy was organized like an air-raid though radar-protected territory. He would drop these showers of silver foil out of the plane to deflect the radar. Behind this screen of smoke and mirrors, there was Andy at work. That was the real function of the entourage. It was a way to get the attention away from Andy, while he hid behind them, doing his number. The entourage was there to distract the attention, to titillate and amuse the public, while Andy was doing his very serious work. Andy was a very hard-working artist, a working man. He hid this very carefully, creating the myth that his products just kinda appeared. I’m probably one of the very few photographers who actually has pictures of Andy with his hands on a paintbrush and the paintbrush touching the painting. He didn’t want to get paint on his hands. So like any great artist, he had an atelier. He manipulated people to do things for him. It was a very studied casual act, ‘Hey, you do it.’ While he was working, he also had others work for him… Well, what else is a Factory? It was a brilliant scam.”

Older than everyone (except Warhol), Nat was a macho from Brooklyn, the straight guy in a sea of Superstars and Pop Art, with a camera, a sharp tongue, and no time for most men. He called the Velvet Underground, “The Psychopath’s Rolling Stones.” Lou Reed’s response? “The three worst people in the world are Nat Finkelstein and two speed dealers.”

At a time when drugs became part of America’s identity, Nat knew the score, always able to access the counterculture’s inner core. In his memoirs, he recounts, “The C.I.A utilized psychomemetics in the MK-ULTRA Project, a secret experiment in mind control, AKA ‘Brain Washing,’ often on unwitting subjects, several of whom would kill themselves. Time-Life publicized and popularized LSD in a stream of articles and pretty (although bogus) pictures. And then, in 1964, the mainstream media appointed an academic mercenary, ex-West Point, ex-Harvard Professor Timothy Leary as their ‘New World’ poster child. Leary—sponsored, financed and supported by a group of old wealth American industrialists—peddled ‘The Psychedelic Experience’ from a 4,000-acre estate in Millbrook, New York. Buttressed by the intellectual cachet of Aldous Huxley, plus the financial backing of the Mellon family and the CIA, Timothy Leary founded an organization called IFIF (International Foundation for Internal Freedom) and recruited a coterie of academics with a mystical bent, who forgot that after Brave New World came 1984.”

Nat was invited to Millbrook, and the meeting with Leary was less than successful. For even a drug dealer as successful as Finkelstein was leery of the relationship between the government, the media, the figureheads that brought LSD and amphetamines into American popular culture. He eventually retreated to his home in upset New York, where journalist Al Aronowitz (who introduced the Beatles to Bob Dylan in 1964) described him as, “Nat Finkelstein, Kokaine King of Woodstock.” Nat reigned supreme for a moment or two, and then, as is the case in the underworld, the cover blew.

In 1969, his lawyer called him to New York and revealed a document from the FBI that stated:

A NOTICE

WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
HEREBY EMPOWER YOU TO BRING BACK THE BODY
OF
NATHAN LOUIS FINKELSTEIN
CLASSIFIED ARMED AND DANGEROUS
NONSUICIDAL

In fear for his life, Nat Finkelstein left the United States. He traveled the Silk Route in the 1970s, appearing in the most unlikely places, eventually sentenced to four years in prison in France for possession of hashish. Nat’s memoirs revealed, “While in prison, I petitioned the United States government, the CIA, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, under the Freedom of Information Act. Both the FBI and the CIA to this day have refused to release my records. However, the DEA records stated that in 1973, while I was still a fugitive, all charges against me were dismissed upon judicial review by a Judge Hector (Lopez or Gomez), with an extreme castigation of the Federal government for illegal actions against me. However, the government not only did not inform myself, my family, my in-laws, or my attorney that these charges were dropped, but forced me to live the life of a fugitive until 1978. Further, my agencies, my publishers, my family, et cetera, had been informed that if they were to publish any work done by me, prior to this dismissal, that they would be arrested for aiding and abetting a fugitive. My voice had been effectively silenced.”

When Nat returned to America in 1982, a free citizen, he inquired to Black Star agency and Life magazine about the whereabouts of his negatives. He notes in his memoirs, “Previously, Howard Chapnick of Black Star had told my ex-wife Jill that a woman purporting to be my wife, with a supposed letter from me, had come to the agency demanding that all my negatives be turned over to her. The only thing remaining of my work, aside from my Warhol series, were four or five prints which were made during various assignments.”

While many photographs remain lost, other come to light. In 1995, a collection of 170 color transparencies from The Factory was discovered to be misfiled under the wrong name at a London photo agency. Among the images are Warhol eating pizza, John Cale dozing off, Nico reading the paper, Edie Sedwick applying lipstick—the intimate moments Nat shared through the years.

His time at The Factory was but a chapter in one of those rare lives that crisscross the world at length, as photographs continue to emerge from the recesses of the earth. Photographs shot on August 8, 1965 at a civil rights protest in Washington D.C. came forth from the archives of Life magazine in 2004. As Nat recalled in an essay for The Blacklisted Journalist, there were members of, “The DuBois Society, CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality), SNCC (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee). Fresh from voter registration drives in Mississippi, militants from Newark and Harlem were joining up with kids from Y.A.W.F. (Youth Against War and Fascism). White middle class kids and black militants coming together in an uneasy alliance. Together with the various Pacifist societies, as well as the followers of Martin Luther King, who previously had eschewed the anti war movement, they joined to form an Assembly of Unrepresented People, determined to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right of free assembly in order to petition their government and declare the war in Vietnam to be a racist war.”

Then things got ugly. As Nat wrote, “The first people to be accosted and intimidated by the police were the Afro-Americans. During the march, an apparently late Nazi threw some of his own paint, and was also roughed up by the police. However, he was not arrested. At this point, the police forces were led and instructed by a non-uniformed, unidentified man, who apparently commanded the police to be rough. In fact, you can see this man in the pictures. Who he was, no one may ever know. As you can see from the photographs, the other photographers stayed at a short distance from this action, whereas I was fully involved, as you can see one picture, to the point of being punched in the stomach by a policeman during the melee, even though I was wearing official press credentials identifying me as a photographer from Life magazine. I did my job recording the information before me; the brutality, the obvious concentration on people of color, the fingernails crunching nerve endings, the faces squeezed, the glee of the oppressors, the courage of the kids.

“As you’ll notice from these photographs, there were no “long-haired freaks?: no Abbie Hoffman, no Jerry Rubin, no Allen Ginsberg. No pot, no gratuitous violence on the part of the protestors. This came later. It is my firm belief this was done by the so-called capitalist “Free Press.” The mainstream media that appointed theatrical clowns such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary, as representative of the antiwar movement. When actually, the antiwar movement consisted of the students and the ordinary American working class.”

Throughout his years on this earth, Nat was a champion for the underdog, defying the corrupt system through his art, words, and actions. His actions—while not always legal—held to another ethic; that integrity means holding firm in a raging storm. A typhoon like Nat Finkelstein may have left this earth, but his legacy is a life that challenged and ran counter to the hypocrisy of the world.

Originally published in
Le Journal de la Photographie
18 March 2011

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Photography