The late 1960s was a time of urban unrest at home and war abroad; it was also a golden age for documentary film photographers. Each week Life and Look magazines published eloquent black and white photo essays of momentous events of the day, as well as of the lives of ordinary people. Museums exhibited black and white photographs in rooms usually reserved for oil paintings, and in popular culture young people were enchanted by Simon and Garfunkel’s anthems to the 60s.
“I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away”
Recently graduated from architecture school, I had an entry level job with a firm in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston. The job was a good one, a lucky find, but after two years I began to tire of the tedium of drawing unseen building details and of analyzing mind-numbing building codes. Frustrated, I pined for something more creative. I had two cameras: a brand new 35mm Pentax, and a $20 used Rolleicord, the little brother to the Rolleiflex that Vivian Maier used for her street photographs. Using them to take pictures of my family and friends on weekends, my interest in photography grew.
In 1968, I bought a copy Edward Steichen’s epic 1954 photobook, The Family Of Man, a collection of over five hundred black and white photographs celebrating Steichen’s heroic vision of humanity. I didn’t verbalize it in this way at the time, but the visual and emotional message of the book sunk in. Looking up the work of individual photographers exhibited in the book, it wasn’t long before I discovered the French photographer, Cartier Bresson and the photographer’s cooperative he co-founded, Magnum Photos. I thumbed through Magnum’s books on bookstores shelves and was enthralled by how they portrayed life with beauty, humor, and profound meaning.
In 1969, the National Museum of Art re-published The Americans, a 1958 book by the Hungarian-American photographer, Robert Frank. Filled with gritty impressionistic street photographs, Frank’s images challenged the romantic depiction of America portrayed in The Saturday Evening Post magazine and TV sitcoms of the time. They showed that street photography could be art. Right then and there, I knew this was what I wanted to do.
Inspired, I started taking pictures whenever I could. Before long, I was shooting before work, at lunchtime, after work, and on weekends, limited only by what I could afford to pay for film and processing at the local drugstore. It was not enough. After doing the math, I bought the necessary equipment to build a darkroom, which I installed in a laundry room at home. Working into the morning hours to rock and roll music, I watched with fascination as silver was turned into luminous images on paper. This wasn’t just telling stories with pictures, it was also making beautiful objects. I fell in love with photography.
Boston was ideal for beginners. Its sidewalks, subways, parks, and markets were rich stage sets with stories ready to be captured on film. I started walking the narrow streets of Boston’s Little Italy, the North End.
Learning to shoot without attracting attention, I would look past a subject, shoot quickly and move on. I anticipated opportunities, would pre-focus, then wait for action. Shooting and conversing at the same time seemed to put people at ease as the camera became a non-factor. Cartier Bresson said to use a 50mm lens. It developed discipline, he said, which in working terms, meant moving closer. This called for nerve, something I had to summon over and over. Moving into other people’s space with the intent of photographing them is not for the faint of heart.
It was not that I didn’t ask permission, but I learned to be judicious and respectful. Asking at the wrong time could be counterproductive.
An architect I worked with said he knew a professional photographer who was a member of Magnum Photography and he could introduce me. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. We met at a diner and talked briefly about taking pictures of people, shooting technique, and cameras. He said, memorably for me, when taking pictures of people always consider including their hands because they are expressive. He also suggested that I consider using the camera that he and many of the other Magnum photographers used, a Leica. I had never heard of it.
The Leica was a legendary 35mm film camera and the camera of choice at the time for documentary photographers the world over. Small, quiet, and inconspicuous, it was perfect for street photography. If you covered it with black tape it would be even less conspicuous (and hip, among young photographers). It was an elegant and subtle camera, and invited elegant and subtle pictures to traverse its lens.
It was also expensive, but he said he knew where I could find a used one at an affordable price, and soon I purchased my first Leica, a used M3, Cartier Bresson’s camera.
The M3 was a rangefinder camera and it didn’t have a light meter. You had to extrapolate to compose and choose f-stops and speed settings by intuition and experience, and you had to do it on the move.
In Boston’s old streetcar suburbs all the action was in the streets. Parades were a family affair and frequent.
Boston in the late 60s and early 70s was the epicenter of demonstrations against the Vietnam war. Images of the war were a staple of the weekly news, and it was not unusual for tens of thousands of people to gather at parks, in front of government buildings, and on college campuses. At one, an army bus carrying soldiers bound for Vietnam became encircled by demonstrators, some angry, some in distress.
One hundred thousand demonstrators against the Vietnam war marched to the Boston Common. There were speeches and rock bands.
In many Boston neighborhoods, patriotic parades demonstrated support for the war.
On a weekend trip to New York City with my six year old son, we took the ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. We brought a Kodak Instamatic to take snapshots of each other. This is the only street shot I took on the trip.
The Boston subway was an underground labyrinth of dimly lit corridors and litter-strewn stations where a fair part of Boston’s population spent their days anonymously coming and going to work. It was easy to shoot pictures.
Department stores offered endless opportunities for shooting, with their intimate spaces, shoppers vying for attention, and glamorous graphics as a backdrop. Cosmetic counters were especially photogenic. But you had to be fast. Security was always close by, looking out for retail espionage.
At home shows you were invisible.
In 1974, I started taking photographs professionally. The idea was that this would pay the bills and improve my personal pictures. I was mistaken.
I had never taken pictures for money and it was a completely new experience. There were deadlines, and the work had to be technically perfect, but on the positive side I always had permission to take pictures and, of course, I was paid.
I started doing available light portraits using a tripod and 35mm camera. I tried weddings and bar Mitzvas (one each). Through my architectural connections, I shot large format promotional color photographs of buildings and interiors. Over the next few years I made money (not a lot) and had some minor successes: a Sunday New York Times Arts Section first page photograph, a Sunday Boston Globe Magazine cover, and a photograph displayed in Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt museum.
On weekends, I would find time to shoot street life, but the enthusiasm was fading; it was as if commercial work had changed something, a way of approaching the work. As a commercial photographer I focused on planning a shoot, being able to be counted on, and satisfying a client – being a professional, in other words. But, at the same time, I missed the conceptual freedom and spontaneity of amateur photography. Only once did professional work engage me in the same emotional and intellectual way as my personal photography: shooting a wedding reception when the family insisted that I work with without strobe or flash and no tripod. Leica shot, 50 mm lens, 1/4 second, f:1.4.
By 1978, It became clear that the segue from being a passionate amateur to that of a professional was not as smooth as I expected, nor as rewarding artistically or monetarily; I knew I had to make a life decision; either be an architect or a professional photographer. Freelancing for architects over the years had given me considerable experience in professional architecture, and I had invested in a professional degree, no small thing. Facing the future, I made a choice and threw myself into architecture. I would be able to take street pictures on weekends and vacations. At first it worked out.
Designing buildings was more time consuming than I expected and later when I opened my own office, forty hours a week became sixty and it wasn’t long before I had little time for street photography. Sundays would come and go. I went to the beach and napped. My wonderful days of seriously shooting in the mornings, at lunchtime, and after work became thing out of the past. The passion of a love affair had waned. Gordon Lightfoot described it in his beautiful 1970 song, “If You Could Read My Mind”:
“I never thought I could act this way
And I’ve got to say that I don’t get it
I don’t know where we went wrong
But the feeling’s gone and I just can’t get it back”
One of the last black and white street photographs I took was at a Saint Patrick’s day parade in Boston’s Irish district, South Boston in 1976. Ted Kennedy was running for senate re-election and he joined the parade. Out of seventy or eighty frames I shot that day, this is the only one I kept.
Over the years, I have reflected on my experiences. It seems to me that amateur street photography is about telling a story that is solely the photographer’s to tell, and no one else’s. It is akin to the work of any artist who shows and sells signed prints at a gallery or publishes a book of his photographs. This is fundamentally opposed to commercial photography, which also tells a story but one intended to illustrate the products or agenda of a client. A renowned Magnum photographer once told me he made his living shooting annual reports for Fortune 500 corporations, not the street photographs he is famous for.
I continued to take pictures, mostly on vacations and weekend trips, but I never shot black and white film again. I used a Nikon FM (analog) with a battery of lenses and saved a collection of color slides (and later, with the advent of the iPhone, a much larger collection of digital images) of friends and places at home and abroad. Over time, I occasionally photographed street scenes, but either because color somehow didn’t live up to the aesthetic of black and white documentary photography I preferred, or I was too far out of practice, the pictures were disappointing. It was as though I had lost a language I once spoke.
But I’ve kept the pictures and, and like those of a long lost love, I look at them them from time to time.
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