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up the history of modern art in the company of my art-obsessed grandfather
INTRODUCTION
If the photographer is interested in the people in
front of his lens, and if he is compassionate, it’s
already a lot. The instrument is not the camera but
the photographer.
- Eve Arnold
SOMETIMES a gift can transform a life. That’s what happened with the Fujica
35-SE my wonderful late Aunt Dina and Uncle Marcus Widmann gave me for
my bar mitzvah way back in 1964, with which I immediately began recording
and documenting my world, which at that time was pretty much confined to
Jamaica Estates, the inner suburb of New York where I grew up (three blocks
away from the current U.S. president): the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair,
which was just about to open, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Those were still the days before MOMA became the behemoth it is today.
My aesthetic, as well as my passion for photography were unquestionably
influenced and enhanced by the many afternoons, I spent at MOMA, soaking
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(and thankfully so) Flory and Myrtil Frank, who were art dealers themselves.
As the visitor who browses this retrospective exhibit, which covers the gamut
of my photographic and photojournalistic peregrinations, from my “wonder
years” growing up in Jamaica Estates, through my college years at Cornell,
which also coincided with the Vietnam War, through the magical summer
of 1969, where my photographic career began when I worked for the U.S.
National Park Service at Lake Mead, Nevada; through my travels across the
country since—can see, most of my photographic mentors, per se, have been
painters. If you look closely, you’ll see the shadow of the great realistic American
painters Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler and several of the other artists
of the American Renaissance of the 1920s, which remains my favorite decade
(and I have the buck shoes to prove it).
You’ll also see a great deal of my life: the places I have been, the experiences I
have had, the people I have loved—and in at least one case, loathed (namely the
commissioners of the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals, the last
place where I had a “regular job”)—as well as the myriad times when I glimpsed
a moment, or a composition, or both, which I simply had to photograph.
You’ll also see a record, albeit a quixotic one, of the last six decades of American
history. The innocence of the World’s Fair, which coincided with the apex of
The American Century, as the 20th century has been called; the War and the
student rebellion of the 60s; 9/11; the motor styles, clothing styles, and, to
some degree, the mind styles (so to speak) of the last half century—all the
things, or at least many of the things which comprise “my” America can be
seen here.
This, it should be noted, is the second iteration of My America. In 1998 I also
mounted a retrospective of my U.S. photography at Taidehalle, the Municipal
Art Hall of Helsinki. That exhibit, which I mounted when Finland was emerging
from the twilight zone of the “Soviet time,” as that country’s difficult postwar
period has been called, was intended to commemorate America’s long
friendship—as well as my own more recent one—with Suomi. It also was a
great success, as such things are measured, and a great experience. And one
I hoped to be able to recreate at some future date. And so twenty one years
later, here we are.
The impulse behind My America 2 mirrors the one behind its predecessor.
Just as Finland was coming into its own, again, as a fully independent Western