Sally Mann’s Examination of Life, Death and Decay

Mann’s book and exhibition, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” at a Richmond, Va., museum, ranges from crisp early work to later chaotic meditations on death.

By Steve Appleford, Special to the Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Lexington, Va.

The meandering path to the cabin where Sally Mann once photographed her young children is through a forest of towering oak, maple and hickory. It’s on the Maury River, a mile and a half from the house and studio she designed for herself, and as she walks loudly through a thick layer of leaves and branches, she mentions something about bears.

She saw a couple of black bears here just the other day while on horseback. “They’re perfectly harmless,” she insists, still crunching through the leaves, her dogs barking around her in the fading afternoon light, “but they shake you up a little bit.”

The cabin is empty now and her three kids grown, each the subject of ongoing curiosity whenever spotted at one of their mother’s openings, art stars by birth. The period when she made those photographs was just the briefest of moments, a time of bloody noses and feral nudity at home and by the water, documented to great acclaim and discomfort in the 1992 book “Immediate Family.”

Her interests have since expanded from that youthful, naked idyll to images of mortality and inevitable decay, of ancient Civil War battlefields and cadavers rotting in the wild. She’s turned the camera unflinchingly on herself and photographed the progression of late-onset muscular dystrophy in her husband. At 59, that makes Mann the ultimate nature photographer, facing the raw and unthinkable of life experience with an 8x10 view camera. “The body is fraught,” she says. “It’s dangerous territory.”

This is the theme of “Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit,” a book and exhibition that examine the through-line from her crisp early work to her murkier, almost chaotic later meditations on death. Hosted by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, with a vivid catalog published by Aperture Books, it is not a true retrospective, but a gathering of images that cohere on the business of life and its end.

“She takes what’s close to home and makes that stand for universal themes,” says John R. Ravenal, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia museum. “If it’s not her children, then it's herself or her husband or the landscape around her. They’re nurtured by the land and their connection to the culture and community.”

“Every time a death occurs in my life, I’m just stunned by the emotional impact it has on me and the void that is left behind by that person,” Mann says. “There is a great line from Laurie Anderson: 'When my father died, it was like a whole library had burned down.' The power of death just knocked me flat. I thought it was something I better look into.”

Early this decade, that exploration took her from the 425-acre farm of rolling hills and forest she shares with her husband to the Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center (a.k.a. “the Body Farm”), where donated bodies are left to the elements so scientists can better understand human decomposition in criminal cases. On one of her three visits, there were 40 cadavers on the grounds. “And they were gorgeous. Beautiful,” she recalls. “Nature is really efficient, and she doesn't spare on the aesthetics.”

In some pictures she made there, she operated from a respectful distance, but in others she forces the viewer to take in the full ravages of nature on the human form. There are close-ups of torn flesh and faces drawn back into ghastly smiles.

Homebody

On the anniversary of her father’s death — he died in 1988 — she sits in her kitchen, dining on a casual meal of venison and fried apples harvested from her property. He was a country doctor and local eccentric, a noted gardener of trees and shrubs and the maker of playfully lewd abstract sculptures. He also passed on his 4x5 view camera to Mann.

She rarely leaves the premises, Mann admits happily, and she's clearly relaxed here, chatting seriously but unpretentiously about her work. She’s dressed in jeans and a black sweater, her long, brown hair streaked with gray and tied loosely behind her. In the next room is her library, crowded with books on Walker Evans, Nan Goldin and other photographers, below the mummified carcasses of rats and cats nailed artfully to the wall.

She was further awakened to an interest in mortality after a horse-riding accident in 2006. While riding on a nearby trail, her Arabian suffered an aneurism, threw Mann to the ground and then stomped on her before collapsing, breaking Mann's back. The horse died and the photographer was immobilized for months. “I felt completely smashed,” she says. “When you can’t move properly and everything hurts, you feel like you're 100 years old. And I thought, oh man, this is what’s right around the corner.” Her response was a series of shadowy self-portraits, shot up-close and mercilessly. For this and much of her later work, she turned to the archaic collodion wet-plate process, and the results were characterized by smudges, scratches, accidental chemical reactions and frayed edges, all suggesting the passage of time.

It's also how she has photographed her adult children and her husband, Larry, as he weakens from muscular dystrophy. In one portrait, titled “Was Ever Love,” he's bearded and on his back, still strong but as still as a battlefield casualty. In others, his muscles are wasting away. “We’ve been married for 40 years,” she says of the pictures, “so I think he knew it was coming. It really is about trust.”

She never relocated to New York to become part of the art and photography establishment, meeting curators and buyers, but chose to remain in rural Appalachia, where she found her greatest subjects and purpose.

Until Mann was 7, she refused to wear clothes and ran naked through the isolation of her parents' 30 acres with a pack of dogs. It's largely how she raised and photographed her own kids. “The Flesh and the Spirit” includes lesser-known color images of her family, shot with a medium-format range-finder camera (in contrast to the 8x10 black-and-white vision of “Immediate Family”).

“They were made in such a unique set of circumstances,” Mann says now. “America being a fairly suburban country at this point, people can't imagine a situation where children can live as freely with nature as those kids did. It seems jarring and forced and strange. But it would have been jarring and forced and strange to tell my kids to put on a bathing suit to swim in a river when there's not a living soul for five miles in any direction.”

The realization that her own children could be an important photographic subject came as the result of an accident in 1985, when her daughter Jessie came home with an eye swollen nearly shut from a bee sting. The picture Mann made that day was “Damaged Child,” still one of her best-known images.

“When you’re a parent, you don’t think it’s so remarkable, and you think you’re going to see that stuff all the rest of your life and you're stuck with diapers and you’re stuck with wet beds and you’re stuck with bloody noses,” Mann says. “I look back on those pictures and even I have a little involuntary gasp when I see them. They were the most ordinary things in the world then.”

Major galleries were initially uninterested in showing the work, but when Aperture published “Immediate Family,” it arrived during a season of outrage over museum showings of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most explicit pictures and Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” The San Francisco home of Jock Sturges was raided by the FBI for his photographs of young nudists. And Mann found some of her own family pictures condemned by critics.

The atmosphere had an effect. “I was resolute and I wanted to put forward this face of complete commitment and belief in the work,” she says. “But looking back on it, I second-guessed myself all the time. I didn't take pictures that I might have taken.”

She took the photographs off the market six years ago, determined to focus on new work, but the family work remains popular. “I bet we could reignite the culture wars with one little, tiny match. It’s right under the surface of conservative America.”

Odd workplace

“Oh, Jesus, there’s a bird in here!”

Mann steps into her barn workroom just as a sparrow rushes past. The walls are already spattered with the black marks of light-sensitive silver nitrate from the last bird that got in, and the room smells of ether. Her big cameras stand high on tripods and jugs of chemicals are collected everywhere.

Hanging from a hook is the pelt of her beloved greyhound, Eva. The dog’s death led to an early exploration of mortality and the body. Her husband skinned the animal and Mann photographed the decay process. It’s a subject she's still looking at.

Mann turns 60 in May, and is already contemplating how much longer she can work. She has much more to do. “I try not to examine the muse too closely. I do tend to go off on tangents and head off into strange territory with no concern that this doesn’t ‘look like a Sally Mann,’” she says. “I just really want to grow and change and evolve, and not take the same thing over and over again.”

Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2010

Photographs by Sally Mann/Aperture Books

Dreams of Life and Death Looking Back With Patti Smith

Patti Smith steps onstage with a shy, joyous grin, as if still surprised by the applause. At the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater to perform a tribute to her friend, the late folk archivist, filmmaker and painter Harry Smith, she rests her coffee cup on a stool and reads passages from Just Kids, her newly released memoir of her years as friend, lover and confidante to the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989 of complications from AIDS. The three of them had once lived in New York's Chelsea Hotel — "a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe" — and when Harry first met young Patti and Robert, he'd asked them, "Who are you? Are you twins?"

Harry was of a tradition to which Patti and Robert aspired, scraping by in the days before the mass distribution of credit cards, making art with few resources and no rewards. "If we didn't have money, we just didn't eat. That's when men were men," Smith says, playfully making a fist. Bohemia wasn't a romantic notion but stark reality, even for the likes of Harry Smith, a beloved resource of Americana, whose 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music album was a crucial influence on Dylan's generation. He died at the Chelsea in 1991. "I don't know if Harry died in obscurity," Smith says, "but he certainly lived it."

She skips through the book, reading of a lobster dinner at Max's Kansas City with Sam Shepard, already a recognized playwright, though then known to Patti only as a hillbilly drummer named Slim Shadow. (After Smith discovered the truth, Shepard drawled, "Eat your ice cream, Patti Lee.")

Smith recounts her first meeting with poet Allen Ginsberg, who immediately expressed great interest, taking her out for a sandwich but then suddenly asking in alarm: "Are you a girl?"

The theater is packed, with an overflow crowd watching from the courtyard on video screens. Smith picks up an acoustic guitar and begins strumming the simple, disarming chords of "Grateful," shifting from one foot to the other as she sings in a voice of gentle force. "Harry and Robert were the first people who had me sing to them," she says with a smile, patches of gray in her long, auburn hair. "Harry would say something that would embarrass me then, but now I like it: 'You are quite the chanteuse.' "

Smith dedicates a song to the late J.D. Salinger, another to Howard Zinn, more losses to mark and signify. And she performs one last song for Harry Smith, "My Blakean Year," (from her 2004 LP, Trampin'). It erupts from her as a howl, raging and wise: "So throw off your stupid cloak, embrace all that you fear/For joy shall conquer all despair, in my Blakean year."

*

Smith and Mapplethorpe were barely 20 when they met, a couple of androgynous hippies newly arrived in New York City to live among the bohos and Beats, the Factory divas and "extravagant bums" swirling around the boroughs, the Bowery and the Chelsea. He introduced himself as Bob, but she preferred to call him Robert. They spent their first night together paging hungrily through books of art. Smith was a South Jersey girl turned on by Rimbaud and rock & roll, driven to write and sketch each day, laying a foundation for her future as a poet and rocker. Mapplethorpe had been a Long Island altar boy and was naturally gifted with a pen and brush, a classicist who would become the most notorious photographer of his generation. They inherited a lineage of art and confrontation, with Smith discovering her voice and confidence under the influence of Beat poets Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. For Mapplethorpe, the model initially was Warhol, and he was determined to be noticed.

"I always expected to be a starving, suffering artist who would die young and hopefully leave good things behind. But Robert didn't share that romantic notion," says Smith, now 63. "He really wanted us to do well in our lifetime. The irony of Robert only living until he was 42 is that I was the sickly one. I had gone through tuberculosis, I had gone through various childhood diseases. I was considered the fragile one of the two of us. I wound up the survivor."

Just Kids isn't written in the electrified lingo of Smith's early, prefame poetry or her essays for the likes of Creem and Rolling Stone. It's a gentler tale, direct and unguarded, thoughtful and deeply emotional, with subtler turns of language. It arrives years behind schedule, delayed simply because she took the project so seriously as a work of art, not a memoir of celebrity nostalgia. Just Kids reveals the process of becoming an artist, and bearing witness to the flowering and internal conflicts of her beloved Robert.

"I was a bad girl trying to be good and ... he was a good boy trying to be bad," Smith writes of their relationship. But already, she recalls, "He was an artist and he knew it."

As young, starving artists in Brooklyn, they often chose between buying food and art supplies, sometimes buying the food and shoplifting the ink and brushes (inspired by tales of Lee Krasner doing the same for Jackson Pollock). She worked in bookstores, he sometimes hustled on 42nd Street. They lived and created together, and by 1969 had moved into a tiny room at the Chelsea. He was so nervous about meeting Smith's parents the first time in South Jersey, he dropped acid. They "noticed nothing unusual except his continuous smile," she remembered later. He told his strict Catholic parents they had eloped to Aruba and got married.

The couple disagreed about Warhol: Mapplethorpe idolized him; Smith did not. "His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid," she writes. But they understood and encouraged one another. It was Smith who first suggested that Mapplethorpe pick up a camera. He was given a Polaroid instant camera, and he responded to the immediacy of the process, progressing to the square formality of a Hasselblad. It was an unexpected turn.

"I actually thought it was a phase," Smith says now. "I thought he would pass through that phase and get back to installations and collages and drawings, but he became completely devoted to it. He was smitten with the elasticity of photography, how in a photograph he could say so much."

He photographed Smith constantly, and many of the pictures from that era remain some of his most lasting, striking images: Patti as a boho Mary Magdalene, or cool and coiled by a radiator in a rare nude. Mapplethorpe's cover photograph for her 1975 debut album, Horses, was a landmark for both of them, drawing as much attention as the revolutionary rock music inside. The photo session unfolded in the apartment of Sam Wagstaff, by then Mapplethorpe's patron and lover, but the cosmic connection that day remained between photographer and subject, an intimacy reflected in the startling part-poet, part-Sinatra figure in the frame. He was done shooting after a dozen pictures.

"Then in the mid-'70s he was given entrance to the sadomasochist community, which I knew nothing about," Smith says. "They trusted him in this community, and he had it in mind to do something that no one had ever done. Which was to raise certain areas of human consent into art. That was his mission, to take the very difficult pictures with the same classic view as he would taking flowers or a portrait."

Just Kids is also Smith's antidote to the thousands of pages written on the photographer since his death, in many cases depicting him in ways Smith says she does not recognize. She publicly condemned the portrait painted by 1995's authorized Mapplethorpe: A Biography, written by Patricia Morrisroe, named his official biographer in the weeks before his death. That book cast Mapplethorpe as a dark and perverse figure, more a cruel hustler and self-promoter than any kind of artistic visionary. "... if he had demonstrated any talent as a painter," Morrisroe wrote in one typical aside, "he probably never would have picked up a camera."

Smith remembers things differently.

"Robert and I were not avant-garde–type people," she says. "Both of us studied art in a classical, even self-taught way. We looked at art books for hours on end: William Blake, Michelangelo, surrealism ... I've always studied classical literature, classical music. We were modern kids, thrown into a modern era, but I was quite a romantic and Robert had a real sense of the importance of history. To be a great artist, I believe, is to understand the importance of history and to assimilate it but then do something new."

One night, Smith went to see the Doors perform at Fillmore East, where Mapplethorpe worked briefly as an usher. She found herself observing the singer analytically, recognizing something in the Lizard King prowling the stage. "I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that," she writes. "I felt both kinship and contempt for him."

*

The opening and closing chapters of Just Kids recall the impact and heartbreak of Mapplethorpe's death, in New York, years after Smith moved to Detroit for marriage and family with Fred "Sonic" Smith, onetime protopunk guitarist for MC5. Near the end, Mapplethorpe regretted that he and Smith never had children. She promised to one day tell their story, clinging to her memories and a lock of his hair, still fueled by the self-confidence he helped her discover.

In the 1970s, Smith became the "punk priestess" who helped to reinvent rock as a setting for bold, literary revolt. And death was a recurring theme. Horses acknowledged and celebrated the passing of Morrison, Hendrix and the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. In the album's opening moments, she famously declares, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine," words she wrote at age 20. She embraces life and death in equal measure. On the epic title song, she roars with intensity and release: "Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain/And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud/And go Johnny go, and do the watusi!"

Even the album she called Dream of Life, recorded at a time of contentment in Smith's life, includes "Where Duty Calls," a chilling meditation on the killing of 220 U.S. Marines in Lebanon by a suicide bomber in 1983.

Smith reemerged in 1996 with the jaggedly mournful Gone Again, in the aftermath of her husband's fatal heart attack and the deaths of her brother, Todd, her keyboardist, Richard Sohl, and Mapplethorpe. There was also sadness at the suicide of Kurt Cobain, whom she'd never met but recognized as a kindred, troubled soul. The music and delivery on Gone Again were weighted with experience and implication that even her best '70s work didn't carry. She now calls the album "the most painful record I ever did.


“The pain of singing those songs," she says, "I wouldn't want to have to go through that again."

Yet the tributes to fallen friends and heroes have only continued, as Ginsberg, Burroughs and other comrades fell in the '90s. Mapplethorpe was rarely far from her mind. In 1996, Smith published The Coral Sea, a collection of poetry inspired by his life and passing, mingled with his photographs. A decade later, that work was translated into a live improvisational reading set to brooding, shimmering waves of sound from Kevin Shields, leader and guitarist of My Bloody Valentine. The effect was something like her first recital with Lenny Kaye at St. Mark's Church in 1971. On the new recording, Smith performs this memento mori to the scraping reverberations of guitar strings and organ: "He was destined to be ill, quite ill ... art, art, not nature moved him ... His delicate eyes saw with clarity what others did not."

*

At KCET studios in Hollywood, Smith sits at the very edge of a plaid couch in a room left over from the silent era, her round, wire-rim glasses sitting next to a bowl of fruit. Her jeans are tucked into purple socks and boots as she awaits her moment with Tavis Smiley.

"I write every day," Smith says. "I wrote this morning. I've written four or five books that aren't published. But I also had a lot of little diaries at the Chelsea Hotel, which would chart everything we did every day. Simple things, like, 'Cut Robert's hair like a rockabilly star,' 'Met Janis Joplin,' 'Went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw the de Kooning.' These notations were like stepping stones."

Wyclef Jean is talking with Smiley on a TV mounted on the wall. Smith reluctantly submits to a brief session with the makeup artist and soon enters the studio, where Smiley awaits, muscles bulging beneath his suit and tie. "You chose me," she tells him with a smile, noting the few interviews she has granted, "but I chose you." The makeup lady takes another look, and Smith jokes, "Maybe I'll find a husband." And as the countdown to taping begins, she smiles at the host. "Nice shoes."

Behind Smith and Smiley is a huge blowup of the downtown L.A. skyline, and a large boom camera sways across the floor in front of them as she tells of her awakening as an artist, how she coped when Mapplethorpe told her he was gay, and the love she still feels for him: "We sat and we cried with each other many, many, many times. ... But the fact is, we had much to save, much more than a physical relationship."

When the TV interview ends 30 minutes later, Smith gives the host a hug. "She speaks in prose," Smiley tells his producers, nodding his head with an amazed laugh.

Smith has been a poet and an essayist for decades, publishing small chapbooks early on. Her magazine work celebrated the Stones and Dylan, or the bop jazz men and the great singers she heard while growing up. In that, she was an early-'70s contemporary of literary rock crits Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs. (She was familiar enough in that circle that when Tosches was assigned an interview for Creem years later, she suggested that he already knew her well enough to just make it up. And he did.)

"Criticism is kind of a funny word, because I never wrote anything bad," she says now. "I only wrote about things that I liked. I thought that a critic was there to open people's eyes, not criticize. I only wrote about things I wanted to share with people. It could be Clifton Chenier or Lotte Lenya or Albert Ayler. I truthfully wrote on the side to make money to eat. You'd make $10. I had a really nice piece in Rolling Stone, I got $20 for that. Twenty dollars back in 1971 was real money." Rent at the Chelsea was $65 a week.

*

Barely a year after his death, Mapplethorpe became a rallying point for opposite ends of the culture war, a dividing line between free expression and the conservative campaign to abolish federal funding for the arts. His most controversial pictures were already years old by then but were quickly caught up in the same moment of moral outrage that surrounded Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and the family pictures of Sally Mann, and led to the FBI raid on Jock Sturges in 1990.

Throughout his short career, Mapplethorpe explored a small but diverse variety of subjects, with graceful, sensuous images of flowers, sculpture and nudes, with evocative portraits of himself and others. In 1990, all that was eclipsed by his most difficult work, the pictures of rough sex, and of abused and bloodied genitalia. Not all of it was unprecedented. His Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, from 1979, had a leather-clad male couple in a relaxed living room setting, one of them in chains, not unlike a classic Diane Arbus portrait of the unseen. There were also pictures of very young children au naturel, which critics interpreted as grimly as possible. A scheduled exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., was abruptly canceled, which didn't stop U.S. Senator Jesse Helms from tearing up the show catalog on the Senate floor. The same exhibit was shut down by police in Cincinnati.

"I think the controversy would have deeply disturbed Robert on one end, especially the idea that he was taking forbidden pictures of children," Smith says. "I remember when he took those pictures. He said, 'Look at this picture. Isn't it so cute?' And I said, 'Oh, Robert, that's so sweet.' We just looked at them as really cute pictures of kids. And having looked at so many pictures of the Victorian photographers and their pictures of children, to me they expressed Robert's love of children. That kind of sensibility never occurred to either one of us. It's the only thing that I'm happy he was spared."

Her own relationship with photography continued. Smith became a compelling subject and muse to Annie Leibovitz and others. Magazine photographer Steven Sebring spent 11 years shooting documentary footage of Smith for his film Dream of Life, released to acclaim in 2008. Smith has also devoted creative energy to her series of ghostly Polaroids, which she began soon after her husband's death.

"I couldn't do anything else. I really couldn't write. I used whatever energy I had to take care of my kids," she says. "So these photographs are really to give me a sense of self-worth. Then, like Robert, I got hooked on it. And I started taking Polaroids seriously at the end of the '90s, and devoted time to them, and then developing them as silver prints and then platinum. It's become an important part of what I do."

She asked the monumentally influential photographer and Beat comrade Robert Frank to create the music video for her "Summer Cannibals." At the shoot, Smith dared to show him the Polaroids she had been making. "I see what you're doing," he told her. She liked that.

Smith is now well into the recording of a new album with her band, with guest appearances by Tom Verlaine, Flea and her two grown children, pianist Jesse Smith and guitarist Jackson Smith. But the wide attention Just Kids has already received has been encouraging. Other books are likely, exploring other facets and periods of her life and work.

"I was hoping for Robert's sake that people would like it," Smith says. "I thought I could probably count on a certain hard-core audience, but it seems like it has spread. Robert would like that. He always wanted me to be successful. If the book does really well, it will be in Robert's name. So it's perfect that it's probably the biggest response I've had for something in some years. It figures Robert would be behind it."

L.A. Weekly, Feb. 18, 2010


PHOTO COURTESY OF PATTI SMITH ARCHIVE
Patti and Robert on the Coney Island boardwalk, circa 1969

Photographer: Julius Shulman 1910 - 2009

Function and Imagination at Human Scale

By Steve Appleford

Photographer Julius Shulman lived high up in the hills of Laurel Canyon, where visitors to his landmark 1947 steel-frame modernist house would usually find chocolates and a big jar of peanuts amid the organized clutter of his office. That’s how Shulman, who died in his sleep July 15 at age 98, liked his architecture: lived in, with function and imagination rendered at human scale.

His pictures were, of course, idealized images of modern homes and other buildings, but the human figure often played a crucial role, perhaps most spectacularly in the startling elegance of his “Case Study #22.” In that 1960 photograph, two young women sit comfortably in the corner living room of a glass-walled Pierre Koenig home as it extends out over the lights of nighttime Los Angeles, interior and exterior in vibrant harmony. It was powerful evidence of a rich culture in Los Angeles — though too many of his pictures have outlived the original structures.

Shulman was an enthusiastic champion of other L.A. photographers and was still shooting during his final years with the help of collaborator Juergen Nogai. He’d traveled the world, but never felt the need to relocate to Manhattan or any other city bursting with architecture. He found his greatest subject right here.

LA Weekly, July 29, 2009

Robert Frank Goes From Ignored to a National Treasure

The photographer's stark, unvarnished photos depicting life in the U.S. are at the National Gallery of Art.

By Steve Appleford

He was a foreigner with a camera, a young artist newly arrived on the streets of Manhattan from the Old World, muttering over and again, "What a town, what a town . . ." Robert Frank came from Switzerland in 1947, and he was in America to stay, eager to apply his ideas about art and photography and new ways of seeing.

In a letter to his parents that first year, the photographer marveled: "Only the moment counts, nobody seems to care about what he'll do tomorrow. . . . Whether you've been here for eight days or eight years, you are always treated like an American! There is only one thing you should never do, criticize anything."

Frank found not only a home in the United States but also his greatest subject. By the end of the 1950s, he had traveled some 10,000 miles of road between the coasts and taken a hard look at the country for a book called "The Americans." In 83 pictures of grainy black-and-white, he revealed a darkness behind the postwar euphoria, a tension and isolation amid fat American cars and bulging jukeboxes, cowboys and gray flannel suits.

"The Americans" was neither a critique nor a celebration. Frank's natural interests lay at the margins, showing the new superpower in ashen shades of gray. His utter lack of sentimentality may have been the most shocking thing of all. This wasn't Life magazine or Norman Rockwell. If there was something familiar about the pictures, it was that their starkness was reminiscent of the way many Americans viewed the Soviet Union, as a dark and inhuman place, marked by drudgery and low expectations.

"The Americans" was published in France in 1958, and the next year in the U.S., where it was not greeted warmly. Photography magazines hated it, and most art critics ignored it completely, as they did virtually all photography at the time. But the book was highly influential, marking a dramatic shift in the content and approach of street photography, inspiring wave after wave of visionary image-making in the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and every generation of photographers since.

Fifty years later, Frank -- who is now 84 -- has come to be seen as a national treasure. Recently, he opened his archives to Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, which is hosting an exhibit around "The Americans." There's a new edition of the book (reconstructed from new scans of vintage prints) and a comprehensive program to republish all of Frank's books and his other photography, much of it never before collected in book form. There is even a series of DVDs of Frank's groundbreaking work as an independent filmmaker, beginning with his playful 1959 Beat Generation parable, "Pull My Daisy," featuring Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, with narration by Jack Kerouac.

At the center of all this is "Looking In: Robert Frank's 'The Americans,' " a catalog to the National Gallery of Art show. Running more than 500 pages, it is a remarkable examination of Frank's greatest work and the two-year road trip that transformed him into a kind of photographic De Tocqueville for the nuclear age. Featuring correspondence with mentors Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, drafts of Kerouac's original introduction and full-page reproductions of vintage contact sheets with Frank's original markings, "Looking In" is easily the most significant, insightful study of an important photographer's work since 2003's "Diane Arbus Revelations." It opens up Frank's process of patience and instinct without diminishing the mystery or effect of the finished work.

Frank shot 767 rolls of film for "The Americans" before editing all that material down to the final images. There were pictures of stars and stripes, funerals and crucifixes, a sad-eyed young elevator operator gazing into space as a blur of passengers rushes past her. A Butte, Mont., hotel window overlooks a landscape of grime and industry. A baby crawls beneath a jukebox dropped into a South Carolina shack like the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The book featured brief captions -- "Trolley -- New Orleans," "U.S. 285, New Mexico." If any collection of photographs didn't require words, it was "The Americans." It hardly mattered that it was in Charleston that he photographed a white infant in the arms of a black nurse. The same scene was being repeated from Dixie to Beverly Hills to the Upper East Side.

These were not accidental compositions or chaotic snapshots but evidence, as he later put it, of a powerful "vision of hope and despair. That is what I want in my photographs." It's an aesthetic that is becoming as distant in this digital age as the daguerreotype, and there is no better evidence of what's being lost in the transition than Frank's book.

His sole authorship of a new kind of photography is often overstated. Others, such as William Klein and Louis Faurer, worked in a similar fashion that same decade, unafraid of grain and blur and visual confrontation. (Klein's daring book of pictures, "Life Is Good and Good for You in New York," was published in 1956, two years before "The Americans.") Frank was part of a movement, an accelerating shift in postwar perception, but it was his book that made the most coherent statement.

What's interesting is how his earlier work, from the 1940s and early 1950s, set a clear path as to what was coming. Even before he got the first of two Guggenheims and set out on his cross-country journey of discovery, Frank had already produced brooding images of Europe and the New World. His photographs of England (collected in "London/Wales") were dark, elegant, foreboding, with bankers in top hats or bowlers gliding along the misty alleyways of financial London.

Although the photographer would enjoy a long association with the Beats, he wasn't easily defined. Instead, he stood apart, a peer and not a follower, an individual on his own parallel track. In a piece unpublished until 1970, Kerouac recalled a 1958 drive to Florida with Frank: "I suddenly realized I was taking a trip with a genuine artist and that he was expressing himself in an art form that was not unlike my own and yet fraught with a thousand difficulties."

After "The Americans," Frank was determined not to repeat himself and searched for a means to expand on what he'd done. There would be other photography projects, including a haunting, abbreviated series of pictures shot entirely from within New York City buses. And yet the bulk of his work as a still photographer was done before 1960.

He was largely a filmmaker from that point on, with notable side trips into deeply personal mixed-media art, videotape and Polaroids. "Looking In" examines "The Americans" in the context of that later work, with several informative and thoughtful essays by, among others, Luc Sante and the book's editor (and exhibition curator) Sarah Greenough.

For years, Frank seemed interested in pushing "The Americans" away, which only mythologized it more. Still, he couldn't help coming back, sometimes as protector, other times as an avenging force. In some later work, he tore his early pictures into pieces and nailed them into new collages. Through it all, he has remained suspicious of fame, which Kerouac once described as being "like old newspapers blowing down Bleecker Street."

And yet, there is his influence, which has done nothing but expand with time. The rough edges he helped introduce are everywhere now, framed by new photographers for maximum tension and effect. Their shared journey is like Frank's picture of an empty road halfway through the last century, a strip of asphalt and mystery unspooling into the infinite horizon. "Looking In" offers us a look back, to the place where that horizon begins.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 15, 2009

New Wave or the Truth?

Writer Joe Carducci relays the story of iconic L.A. punk label SST Records through the eyes of its photographer, Naomi Peterson

By Steve Appleford

The secret history of punk sneaks up at unexpected moments. It’s well after midnight on the Loyola Marymount campus, and the place is deserted, except in the little fourth-floor studio of KXLU, where a couple of punk-rock vets and impresarios are the guests on Stray Pop, a weekly radio show. One is a punk-rock intellectual, the other is not. Joe Carducci smiles beneath the fluorescent tubes but looks damn serious with his graying beard and Jack Nicholson hairline. He’s here with a bag of CDs and ancient LPs to share some choice cuts of noise and dysfunction, of sounds ingenious and unlistenable, and songs of brilliant melody and attack. There is punk and original-recipe hardcore, some avant-garde, even a bit of Wyoming bluegrass.

And the dude sitting next to him is called Mugger.

They once shared ownership of the mighty SST Records with founder Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, back when the label was a center of the secret rock & roll underground, home to Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, the Meat Puppets and other musical malcontents. Back then, Mugger “loved trouble and laughs,” Carducci remembers, and you can still see some of it in this fit, surf-city joker with his on-air raunchiness. But he’s also the father of an 11-year-old son in Long Beach who goes to Catholic school on the weekend, and whose name is definitely not “Little Mugger.”

Carducci hands an album to host Stella Voce, a champion of outsider rock and indie sounds since she first took the FM microphone, in 1980. It’s called Chunks, a DIY, punk-era Nuggets-style punk compilation from 1981, and on the back cover is the familiar, cryptic handwriting of artist Raymond Pettibon: “Guns don’t kill people, songs do.”

Soon, we hear Mugger’s voice on the vinyl, a track from a quarter-century past by his old band, the Nig-Heist. His snarling “Fuck!” is blown right over the early morning airwaves. Carducci looks up. “Oops.”

This stuff is dangerous, and that was part of its charm, before punk became a fashion statement and major-label marketing plan, instead of what it first represented: a venue for unpredictable aggression and the avant-garde. SST in Hermosa Beach was about something else. And in 1990, Carducci wrote his own history lesson and 300-page manifesto, fueled by a desire for a return to the carnality of pure rock & roll, and fearing that the whole movement would be forgotten otherwise. His Rock and the Pop Narcotic was as startling and obsessive a statement on rock and its impostors as Richard Meltzer’s The Aesthetics of Rock had been for another generation of disagreeable rockroll thinkers.

Carducci’s now done the same for Naomi Petersen, the house photographer for SST, who died in 2003. His memoir, Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That, takes a hard look back at his time in L.A., at the music and contradictions of that scene, and what it meant to be a woman in the uncompromising world of Black Flag. He’s talking about this on the air with Voce, as the clock edges toward 3 a.m. and the next DJ is anxiously setting up. Mugger has a flashback to another time in local punk-rock cuisine as he leans into the mike: “So, are we going to Oki-Dog’s tonight?”

It was art, not politics, that fueled the SST revolution, that sent no-frills van tours by Black Flag and others rocketing across the country, planting seeds even they were unaware of. “If you were after money, you just weren’t in our scene,” Carducci says now. He arrived at SST in September 1981, right before Black Flag’s Damaged hit the street, selling a quick 60,000 units locally but facing ambivalence from East Coast distributors. “They couldn’t imagine punk rock coming out of L.A.,” he says. “It’s hard to believe, but it was conventional wisdom.”

Money was tight. Ginn and his partners lived at the office, sleeping under their desks, on couches, sleeping bags, with no money and no regrets in their strange commune. If they were hungry, they might walk over to the nearby home of Ginn’s parents for a sandwich.

One night in ’82 at SST, Naomi Petersen, then just 17, hooked up with Mugger in his van. He immediately retreated under his desk, leaving her to drive back to Simi Valley at least a little drunk. When she got home at 2 or 3 a.m., her father locked her out of the house. Then the phone rang at SST. Dukowski answered. It was Petersen, calling from a phone booth, her wrists slashed, “throwing herself again on Black Flag’s mercy,” writes Carducci. She was told to come back, and she slept there. No one could tell if she’d been serious, but friends could still see the scars a decade later.

Carducci heard she had a Nikon camera, so the next morning, she was hired as a photographer. Her first assignments were Saccharine Trust and St. Vitus. And Carducci was thrilled to have photos to send to the fanzines and college papers hungry for SST news, even if the mainstream media were generally oblivious. Petersen became a key figure there, a rare female peer in the Black Flag orbit and something more than another momentary conquest. By 1985, she had her own rep on the national indie scene, while keeping her day job as hostess at the Black Angus restaurant in Northridge, where she worked with her friend Duff McKagan, bassist from a new band called Guns N’ Roses.

“There was something of a toll that women or girls paid when they got next to Black Flag,” Carducci writes. He spoke also with Black Flag singer Henry Rollins. “He said if you were a girl around Black Flag, you were going to get fucked. Not raped, but fucked,” says Carducci. “The girls who came up to them, some were troubled or drunk, some were extremely intelligent and were operating on the same level we were: art and action.”

The label was home to a full roster of sonic revolutionaries, bands that were freeform and unique and shared a true DIY ethic. The Minutemen were “fucking corn dogs” from Pedro led by the great singer-guitarist d. boon, and the Meat Puppets “were a mix of heady and redneck,” writes Carducci, and the only band everyone at SST could agree on.

I got to be a tourist in that world for a time, as a student journalist as obsessed with the SST roster as any miscreant or college boy looking for raw kicks on the fractured punk-rock scene. There were other bright spots smoldering within the underground during those years just before punk (and Nirvana) broke, but SST was the only brand that mattered, a real stamp of approval for an alternative state of mind. So there were far-flung shows and interviews with Sonic Youth, the Puppets and Minutemen, and then my pilgrimage to the Ginn family home in Hermosa to interview Rollins himself.

We would talk in the backyard, where a large pair of plaid pants hung from a clothesline, and then step for a moment into the Shed, Rollins’ elevator-sized hovel on the Ginn property that was crammed with cassette tapes and a cot, all beneath the burning gaze of a menacing Charles Manson poster. But on the way in, as we passed through the living room, he introduced me to Pettibon, who is Ginn’s brother and the unpaid SST artist and inventor of the ominous Black Flag logo, still one of the most distinctive trademarks in rock: four black vertical bars in the abstract shape of a flag rippling in the breeze, a design that also suggests pistons at work. Pettibon’s art didn’t come out of punk rock, but it was a crucial venue for him, with an audience of freethinkers and misfits hungry for dangerous images. He sat in an easy chair. But he didn’t look up when Rollins and I passed by. He just glared into space.

Soon after, I was at the SST offices to interview Ginn, a bong at his feet, his hair long and tangled, barely a year before Black Flag disbanded. And before leaving, I briefly met Naomi Petersen, whose name I knew and envied from the series of publicity photos she created. Those raw black-and-white images were a crucial document of an otherwise unknown scene, whose lasting impact would not be fully appreciated until the ’90s, when it was all gone. Petersen’s pictures could be grim or silly, depending on the mood of the band and the moment, created during low-rent photo sessions at a time when major labels typically spent thousands on an artist’s photographs.

Carducci left SST back in 1986, amid growing tension at the label. He wanted to get back to writing. He kept in touch with Petersen for another decade by mail after returning to his former home of Chicago, then moving to Wyoming. She contributed some photographs to his Rock and the Pop Narcotic. But he lost touch with her until hearing of her death, after years of fading health and heavy drinking.

Carducci wrote Enter Naomi not simply because Petersen had died, but because it took two years for him to even hear about it. “It really was like a gut punch,” says Carducci, now 52. “And it goes back to that night when she was bleeding on the floor from her wrists. I was afraid of this in some way.”

Enter Naomi is lovingly researched and bluntly told in rich detail, sometimes lifting from Petersen’s journal entries (“Fucked day — someone shot my car”). It’s also an impressionistic view, at times requiring some awareness of the SST scene and certain events to fully grasp. But Carducci takes it deeper, as only one who knew the players could.

Petersen never made the leap to solvent rock photographer. Some of her earliest work was lost in a shipment to Zurich in the early ’80s, and she was evicted from an apartment in D.C. several years later, her possessions dumped on the street. Petersen and Rollins had talked of doing a book of her pictures in the mid-’90s, but it never happened.

A day after his KXLU visit, Carducci is at Book Soup preparing to read from Enter Naomi. In the crowd is Petersen’s older brother, Chris Petersen, who has a small collection of her pictures in his hands. The book was difficult for him to read, and impossible for their parents, but he and Carducci hope to see a collection of her photos published soon.

“I know it’s important,” says her brother, a real estate investor who, with some partners, recently bought the old Club Lingerie on Sunset, where Petersen once spent so much time. “It would be a shame to hide it.”

Voce has brought her teenage son. And in the front row is Saccharine Trust singer Jack Brewer in a leather blazer, a graying high school dropout who still can’t understand why “all these intelligent people would throw themselves into this thing.” Carducci understands, but there remain a few unanswerable questions from that time, about that scene, about Petersen.

“The music scene is full of pretend nihilists,” Carducci says from behind the podium. “And maybe we didn’t catch the real thing in our midst, because she was such a bright spot.”

LA Weekly, July 4-10, 2008.

Triumph of the Paparazzo

Phil Stern has created some of the greatest celebrity and documentary photographs of all time, but his real love is the sport of getting paid.

Photograph by Nathaniel Welch

By Steve Appleford

The kindly old gentleman with the oxygen tank is waiting on a friend. Phil Stern is on the back patio of his Hollywood home, plugged into the tank, just blocks away from the Paramount lot, peanuts scattered on the table in front of him. It's late afternoon, feeding time for Stern's demanding neighbor, a friendly bluebird named Charlie. Phil knows what it's like to wait for the peanuts to fall.

He has called himself a humble paparazzo, as if he were some kind of handyman with a camera, feeding off the celebrity of the moment. But Phil was no stalker with a telephoto. His metier was always about access, not ambushes and flashbulbs. Along with the usual gigs that kept the kids fed and the rent paid, Stern was a master of the strange, unguarded moment, documenting the movie-making world in pictures both raw and glamorous. He could do the set-up shots, too, with the multiple lights and big cameras and grinning celebrities, but his best work was somewhere closer to the edge, more like Robert Frank than a Hollywood propagandist. Not that Stern always realized it himself at the time. Deep into the files the pictures went, for years and years.

"I've taken mountains and mountains of stuff - which I occasionally describe as mountains and mountains of shit," Stern says, grinning as Charlie hovers nearby. "It so happens, there's a little gem here and a little gem there. You dig out those gems. When a photographer has the advantage of close to a century of work, you end up with lots and lots of stuff. So the law of probability is that, since I've been around a lot longer than most photographers, I have a lot of shit to sift through."

At 84, Stern has outlived many of his most celebrated subjects, and by the 1990s he was really sticking it to the big magazine photo editors in New York. Whenever a major Hollywood star died, a Burt Lancaster or a Dean Martin, Phil would get the call, and he would give them the biggest price he could come up with. Money wasn't really the issue anymore. He spent much of it on his adult children. His purpose was sport. His pictures were intimate, unique, and he knew it. So his business card read: Don't fuck with me.

For years, he had a friendly correspondence with Frank Sinatra, a contest to see who would croak first. They had worked together for decades, Stern and his camera documenting the recording of saloon songs at Capitol Records, taking pictures of Sinatra shoveling pasta into his mouth backstage somewhere, or capturing Frank lighting JFK's cigar at the 1961 inaugural dinner. A big payday was coming, if Phil could just hang on long enough, and he would sometimes send Frank a funny note reminding him of the nice profit his passing would provide.

When the day finally came in 1998, the magazines called as they always did, and CNN rushed over one of its top reporters from Atlanta, a man with a shaved head and a black turtleneck, ready to ask the most obvious questions. What was Sinatra really like? What were Phil's favorite memories of the man? He pored hungrily over a stack of Sinatra pictures. And right there on the counter was a cutout of the singer-actor in a crucifixion pose, another one of Stern's visual gags. A gold mine of Sinatra moments.

Phil had some news for the man from CNN. He would have to pay for the use of every one of those photos. The reporter was momentarily stunned, then pointed out that no less than Herb Ritts had in the past allowed the broadcast of many, many pictures, for no charge at all. Phil just stared at the man, gray head nodding slightly. "I don't have Herb Ritts's publicist."

The stars keep dying, but now Stern lets an agent in New York handle most of the daily negotiations, taking the calls from Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly and People and the rest, demanding big paydays as always, maybe bigger. And the photographer has other pastimes now, at the moment looking over a stack of international magazines celebrating his work, pages and pages of pictures, all of them paid for, of course, and drawn from his massive new book, Phil Stern: A Life's Work (powerHouse).

"I never thought I'd live to see the day that I'd have a book published that's over eight pounds," he says with a chuckle, as he signs a copy with a silver marker. "I get a hernia picking it up, for Christ's sakes."

Anita Ekberg, publicity shoot, 1953.
Photograph by Phil Stern
Courtesy powerHouse Books

Stern has been mostly retired from shooting for at least a decade. A heart attack last year and emphysema have slowed him down and kept him forever connected to his portable oxygen tank. But it hasn't kept him from enjoying a second career ... as an artiste. Or something like that, since Phil Stern rejects use of the words art or artist to describe him or his work. Call him a photographer. Regardless, his best pictures are as close to art as anything by his most esteemed contemporaries. His images often appeared in Life, back when it was a showcase for the likes of the great documentary photographers, W. Eugene Smith and the Magnum crowd.

He first arrived in Los Angeles from New York City in early 1941 as a photographer for Friday, a national leftist weekly, to help open up a West Coast bureau and cover labor, agriculture, and Hollywood. Its motto: "The Weekly Magazine That Dares to Tell the Truth!" It folded the same year, but Stern was quickly recruited as a freelancer for Life and other reputable magazines, spending much of his time on movie sets and backlots. So there he was on the set as Orson Welles directed The Magnificent Ambersons back in 1942, a time now so far gone that it seems (and is) incredible that anyone who was there is still lucid enough to talk about it. And over the decades, Stern would take his camera far behind the scenes: John Wayne in checkered hot pants in Acapulco in 1959, John Huston duck hunting in Mexico in 1960, Rita Moreno rehearsing for West Side Story in 1961. At their best, the pictures were vivid, usually black-and-white, and filled with humor or subtle drama, evocative of far more than just their celebrity value.

The photographer himself is less impressed, although he enjoys your compliments and all the attention. Stern was an admirer of graphic arts and the great painters, and inevitably the use of shadow and light he saw in Daumier and Delacroix seeped into his pictures. But the man was looking for a paycheck, he insists, and he knew that more complex images were likely to earn a higher fee by appearing across two full pages (i.e., "double-trucks"). "That economic factor was important," he says. "I also learned to feel out the tastes of different editors. So in a way, you can make an allegory of Heidi Fleiss and I." He laughs. "I mean, all this bullshit, any photographer that goes 'I only do what I feel in my gut. I don't do what any editor says.' To me, I'm very suspicious."

Others see it differently. "So many talented working photographers have a hard time seeing their work as something special," says David Fahey, who first met Stern while co-curating Masters of Starlight, a 1986 group exhibition of Hollywood photographers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He's represented Stern at L.A.'s Fahey/Klein Gallery ever since. "He can't go an hour without making some kind of self-deprecating joke about himself. But he's certainly aware of how important his pictures are, because enough people have told him how important they are."

In 1942, Stern was recruited by the Army Signal Corps as a soldier-photographer attached to an infantry division, eventually known as Darby's Rangers. This time the pictures he made were on the front line of a world war, bearing witness to invasions, villages ablaze, burned bodies. One of his favorite photographs from that period shows the men of his own unit marching through a town, oblivious to the graveyard beside them. Most of the men in that picture would soon be dead or wounded.

Between combat missions, the Rangers were sent out into the field in order to draw German cannon fire, to see what the enemy artillery could do. Lucky Phil. He was finally seriously injured in North Africa, as enemy fire tore apart his neck, one hand, and both legs. As he recuperated in an Army hospital, he was given a choice: return home or go back out to the front to witness the invasion of Sicily. He went to Sicily. "Twenty-one-and-a-half years old, macho, adventurous, all that shit," he says today. "If I had to do this all over again, believe me, I'd run to Canada. Looking back at it, I don't even believe it happened. To me, it was like a big piece of fiction."

One picture not in his new book happened in the Army hospital. Another soldier there had been shot up, his face torn to shreds and pieced back together by plastic surgeons. The final result fell far short of handsome, with thick scars and a misshapen mouth. Stern got him to attempt his first smile since his injuries. He took the picture, an image that is disturbing and somehow touching all at once.

"You point a camera, and you push the button," he says of his time in the Army. "The only trouble is that your life is at stake, and I came close to being killed quite a few times. But it turns out that everything seems to work in my favor. God apparently is very generous to atheists. He fucks the believers. That's my observation."

How else to explain the windfall today? He has been honored by the mayor and knows city politicians on a first-name basis. At openings of his shows in Los Angeles and New York, he is greeted and feted by the biggest names in photography, and even the new generation of photo editors he has tortured for so long. They act like fans. They are charmed by his winking, streetwise remarks. In 1999, he traveled to Havana for a one-man show organized by the photographer Korda. And people keep buying his prints.

More recently, Michael Jackson rolled up to his house in a limo one day, accompanied by two bodyguards and a young son, Prince. ("I looked at that little blond kid, and he looked like a replica of a little Nordic doll.") Jackson went through his prints, stood teetering on a stool, and left with a pile of prints and a bill for $47,000. He never paid, and eventually all the items were returned but one: A lifesized cutout of a swaggering Marlon Brando, in cuffed jeans and leather jacket, printed up in connection with Stern's first book in 1993.

"I've encountered kooky people, absolutely," Stern says of his career. "Jackson is not quite the pink-cheeked American boy that lives next door." But Jackson still has the Brando, and Stern doesn't have another. He rarely gives up on these things. Too much fun to be had. He'll get it back. Don't fuck with Phil Stern.

Los Angeles CityBeat, March 17, 2004.