Posts from the “1960s” Category

Bobby Seale: All Power to the People

Posted on December 7, 2012

Everyone has a level by which they’re going to deal for self. But in dealing for self you can or cannot be considerate of your fellow human being next to you or near you or around you or in your neighborhood. It was the 60s protest movement that captured the imagination of a lot of young people, including myself. For me to go and hear Martin Luther King speak in 1962 when I was first introduced to, beginning to understand, what that 60s protest movement was about, I was a young college man, I was an engineering/design major, and at night I worked a full time job in an engineering department. I was working on the Gemini Missile project, a government-financed framework putting the satellites up around the earth. I placed myself in the high tech world I loved. So that’s where I was; but I became sensitive, was made sensitive by people like Martin Luther King, by the plight of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They made me understand, made me take the time to research and know the history—not only the colonization of Africa but the history of African Americans in this country. And I had already identified with the history of peoples—when I was 16, before I knew any African American history, I knew Native American history and their plight. It was easy, I guess, that the civil rights protest movement should get to me and cause me to be concerned a young man—not married, to get involved in the protest movement, to the point of literally quitting my engineering job to go to work in the grassroots community and not even make the kind of money I was making.

Now the Constitution of the United States of America and the First Amendment that Huey Newton had pointed out before we started the Black Panther Party gave the people the right to peacefully assemble and peacefully address their grievances. That’s important to understand—morally, correctly so—but more importantly from a legal standpoint. The people had a right to peacefully redress their grievances and peacefully protest. Before the Black Panther Party came along, peaceful protesters were getting murdered shot, killed, brutalized. Peaceful protesters who declared that they were holding peaceful protests. It happened to a lot of protest efforts around the country because they gained momentum, because they were saying, “Let’s make a change.” Violence was getting heaped upon peaceful protesters.

It’s important to understand what we said in our Ten Point Program, when we called for full employment, decent housing, an end to exploitation and robbery of our communities, free preventative medial care for our communities—these were basic civil rights issues that peaceful protesters were about across the board. But politicians would order their police, order their National Guard, order their state police to literally beat the heads of and brutalize the peaceful protesters. So by the time we came along, Huey and I, creating the Black Panther Party, we took the position that if anyone attacks the people of the United States, if any racist or others attack the people of the United States, it’s wrong. Because we would take arrest, that was always our policy: if the police say we’re under arrest, we take the arrest. We were never afraid of the courtroom, but if they come in shooting and not recognizing our human right to live, as a means to try to terrorize us, we will defend ourselves—and that’s what we did. By 1969 every Black Panther Party office across the United States of America was attacked and half of those attacks resulted in shootouts—because the police came in shooting. They didn’t come in saying you were under arrest, they just came in shooting and we defended ourselves. And in that heavy period of 1969, twenty-eight of my Black Panther Party members ended up dead, a couple of them killed by provocateur agents working for the FBI inside our organization. And then they attempted to blame party members for doing it. Now this is why I was heating up, but we defended ourselves. And we had many a rally that was basically peaceful; we had many a gathering that was basically peaceful; we had many a free breakfast for children in churches or in other halls that were basically peaceful efforts. The point is they heaped the violence upon the United States and we defended ourselves from it.

Now people forget how and why all those attacks and all those shootouts—shootouts with the police were largely the police attacking the United States—now why did those police and those attacks stop? People have to remember that by 1970, going into 1971, the United States Senate, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Church headed up an investigation hearing on the FBI because they found out the FBI was going to police departments and setting up and laying plans months in advance to attack the Black Panther Party offices. Now with this hearing the FBI was in the hot seat and the United States Senate asked—it was right on live television—“Why are you running around here attacking these Black Panther Party members?” Now if you take note of history, those investigations were caused by the last two attacks in December 1969. December 4 in Chicago, a predawn raid where the police busted into a house and came in shooting, shot up everybody, and killed and murdered Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. We later proved and showed, and as the Freedom of Information Act documents, that in fact the FBI had an infiltrator who got the plans for the layout of the house. Those plans were given to the State Attorney’s Special Police Force. Six to eight years later, a suit was filed and the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark eventually won millions from the FBI and the State Attorney.

Two days after that shootout they attacked the Los Angeles office, and a month or two after that they laid out plans to attack the national headquarters, the central headquarters of the Black Panther Party here in Berkeley California. I was in jail at the time, but a young white policeman in the Berkeley Police Department had overheard the plans. This young white police officer, hearing them laugh and carry on about how “We’ll kill 10 or 20 of these Black Panther Party when we come in shooting from the downstairs up to the second story through the ceilings,” all this kind of crap—this young white policeman stole the plans and gave them to our lawyer and we called a press conference and put them in the press.

I am trying to show you that there’s smoking gun evidence of how the politicians and others had agreed that they needed to wipe out and terrorize the Black Panther Party. Further, the mayor of Seattle, Washington, a young white liberal mayor, got on television after he discovered the FBI had planned attacks on the Seattle chapters. He said, “We want the FBI out of our department. We will not have the FBI try to spearhead and cause an attack on the Black Panther Party here in Seattle.” Now notice something: after the investigations there were never any more shootouts between the Black Panther Party members and the police in the United States again—ever. That’s the evidence.

This is what people forget or don’t know or don’t understand about our position. The difference is between taking the right of self-defense and at the same time having all kinds of programs around the country. Party members went to do breakfast programs without guns. It’s what we did when we started that Free Breakfast for Children program—it’s one thing to say the racist pig power structure is brutal, it’s murderous; it’s another thing to articulate and specify all the hysterical particulars of how racist discrimination has affected the United States; but it’s another thing to say we’re not only observing the police, we’re going to organize political, electoral campaigns and we’re going to run for political office and we’re going to try to win some of these localized seats where we have these large African American groups.

We were ready to write legislation that deleted the racist discrimination, policies, and institutionalized racism. Because the city council is nothing but a local legislative body—just as a county seat is a local legislative body, as states are local legislative bodies, as the federal government is a local legislative body—it can make laws and policies that make human sense. This is what our revolution was about. Not only had the Black Panther Party spread out in 49 chapters with branches in cities across the United States of America but we had working coalitions with all ethnic groups, including our white, left radical friends, so we had another ten thousand working in our framework called the United Front Against Fascism: The National Committee to Combat Fascism. So to the power structure we were on the proper move to make a change.

What people have to take time to understand was that we, as young college students, injected something into the movement that was relevant, and that legacy is about uniting people and creating greater political electoral empowerment. You have to remember we ran for political office with our names on the ballot: a critique of and opposition to institutionalized racism in the United States. Trying to unite people with electoral and community empowerment and to change legislative bodies as a means to fight against institutionalized racism here in the United States of America: that is what we were about, that is what I stood for, that is what I organized.

—Bobby Seale
As told to Miss Rosen
Oakland 2006

America Was Built on Revolution

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Photography

Afrika Bambaataa

Posted on December 7, 2011

The wonderful Joe Conzo arranged an interview for me with Afrika Bambaataa back in the Fall of 2006, when I was working on That 70s Show. I went in with just two questions: What was the Bronx like back in the day, and what was Hip Hop like before it even had a name. From this came an incomparable story as told to me for issue 2 of powerHouse Magazine, and later featured in Joe Conzo’s book, Born in the Bronx. Dig how Bam is a Buddha and only says the sword “I” twice. Nice. Hip Hop, such as it is meant to be, is the world where You are one with We.

Afrika Bambaataa on New York City in the 1970s:

The Bronx went through different changes. In the 60s, the Bronx had city planning, and organizations made sure you had city planning. You had the blacks and Latinos in the South Bronx, Irish and Italians in the North Bronx, in the Castle Hill area—and they were jumping all the way over to the West Bronx, Broadway, Kingsbridge. In between you had us tokens living in certain areas that would get the racism, trying to “move on up” as they say in The Jeffersons.

You had areas (like the Southeast and South Bronx) with housing development projects, which were like cities in their own right. In these places you had certain street gangs that ruled the areas, or so-called ruled the areas, fighting for what turf was theirs. You had youth gangs that were always mixed with blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and so forth. You had people that were searching for their roots, when so-called black people were Negroes, coloreds, and niggers, and people who spoke Spanish were spics or niggers. Then you had your radicals, your pimps and players, and hookers, and you had people who were construction workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, taxi cab drivers…

There was politics—those trying to change life in certain parts of the Bronx—the fighters, the warriors for the community. You had people that were against the police—the radicals and revolutionaries that were part of the Black Panther Party, part of the Young Lords Party, some were even part of the crazy radical group that was blowing things up, The Weathermen. You had certain radical street gangs, some were more political and others were just to sell drugs and others just to cause destruction. Then you had a street gang within the police department called the Purple Mothers that was out to destroy the street gangs. It was ex-veterans, out to assassinate them. They would take one group and stick you in an area with a group that hated you, or in a white area and drop you off, and you had to make your way home—almost like the way it was in the movie The Warriors.

That was a time when people were fighting for their civil rights and their human rights. We had great leaders that were waking us up. From Malcolm X, Minister Farrakhan, the most honorable Elijah Muhammad, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Richie Perez, Pablo Guzman. They showed all of the things that the community was going through, the life and times of the struggle. So when the drug epidemic hit, messing many of our people up, people unified against it. They were together to move the drug dealers out of the community, All this to the movement called hip hop. Hip hop saved a lot of lives, and brought the unification of many different people together under the banner of hip hop culture. There was my group, which became the Zulu Nation, and we went out and started organizing the people. I used to speak to the different leaders, the gang leaders, and the warriors for the community, and asked them to join this thing I was making. Once you get the leaders in, you start getting the followers and the members behind you, and that’s how we started getting larger than the Bronx, stretching into Manhattan and the rest of the city, then to other states and the rest of the world.

You had areas that were nice and areas that were totally messed up; some would say F’ed up. It was so bad in the South Bronx, they said it was the worst place in the United States. And there was the culture of hip hop, this music. We always had the musical aspect in the Bronx. And we had the drugs, the dope, the coke—all that was plaguing the community. In going from Negro, to colored, to black, to African American, we had certain songs that used to grab the community and make everybody happy. That was the time you would see everybody do some salsa, some calypso, or do each others’ ways—people still trying to find their culture. That’s when books like Down these Mean Streets by Piri Thomas or ManChild in the Promised Land came out, with everybody still trying to find their roots. James Brown came out with “Say it Loud, I’m Black and Proud.”

You had the new birth of salsa that started to get strong on the scene, then came Salsoul with brother Joe Bataan, the Joe Cuba Sextet—they were doing rap back then with that. You could see the salsa and soul at the Apollo, all of that on one stage. Joe Bataan with Dionne Warwick, the James Brown Revue and the Motown sound—all that was happening. It was a sight to see. You had the salsa, the Salsoul, a lot of the calypso, reggae or ska music from the West Indies.

People get so caught up not knowing the true mentality of their roots. Like if you say you’re Puerto Rican, you’re still West Indian, you’re still in the Caribbean. That’s why there was interest in books like Down These Mean Streets, where you are trying to find your roots—was he black, was he Puerto Rican, was he white? Everybody was so caught up on what race or nationality you belong to, like, “If I speak Spanish, am I Hispanic?” People were trying to find themselves—and are still trying to find themselves today. But the music always played a good role in our community. With the blacks and Latinos, every three months you had a new dance. Whites were just finding that they could get that soul—and that they got that soul. You had the radio stations, the good ones, WWRL, WWLIB, WNJR, WABC.

In the black and Latino community, you’re born into music. In your mother’s belly, you’re already feeling the vibrations of what they’re feeling. The rhythm of life comes and hits you. So when you’re born and take that breath of air, calling the Creator’s name, you already feel the vibrations of music. By 1 or 2, we have already started shaking something, by 5 we are in full swing. Getting older, in learning to dance you mimic adults, and then we start to do our own thing, make our own steps and dances that then come into our community.

In the early 70s, we started to bring the house turntables. In the house, you would have a whole component set, and you would have to break it all up first. You would bring this big box—or this little box, trying to put the record on. You had the spindle that dropped six 45s at one time, or you could take the spindle off and just play it manually. You had the close and play. You had the big, retarded 8-tracks, sticking out your car. When they turned to cassettes, everybody was happy because they thought this was the new thing. These 8-tracks were always clogging up all your seats, all your stuff. Before that, you had the reel-to-reel, funny radios with two channels. You would think that you were in the 40s and 50s with that type of stuff. Then they started getting more progressive when they started making better radios. FM came in the 70s, because it was all about AM in the 60s. FM was a cleaner, clearer sound. AM was where you would hear more about what was going on in the community. WLIB was the first black-owned radio station. Gary Byrd on WILL used to do the GBE Experience. There was Cousin Brucie on WABC.

We always had rap in our community. You had Joe Cuba, Gil Scott-Heron, Last Poets. Shirley Ellis with “Clap Your Hands,” “The Name Game,” Pigmeat Markham who came up with “Here Comes the Judge.” You also had your rock records that had a rap to them, like “Joy to the World.” Sly and the Family Stone had a rap on their second album. There was rapping that was done on the radio. You can see how far the rapping, call-and-response thing goes back, even before our time. Back to Cab Calloway and all those cats, all the way to Isaac Hayes and Barry White. You had the poet-rappers, Wanda Robinson, Maya Angelou.

It was basically from seeing so many great teachers that came and taught us how to unify, knowing how to speak to our people, going into different communities, saying let’s make something happen. That and giving community parties, as well as what we added in the 80s, what we called the fifth element: knowledge.

You had that strong black core. That was a time when we would respect each other’s momma. Certain people had that status in the community–don’t mess around, you’ll get your butt whipped. It was interesting to see how these things started to change into the disrespect, or how the brainwashing techniques have started to seep in this day and time, where the youth will just cuss or even try to make a move on their elders, when they are trying to teach them something.

It’s 33 years for the Universal Zulu Nation, 32 years for what we’re calling hip hop culture, but it goes even further than that to years when we might of said the Go-Off, or the Beat-Bop when it didn’t have no name. Add the Zulu Nation’s years to the Black Spades’ five or six years of being organized, and it’s really been organized for quite awhile now.

Hip hop keeps it all together, but you know it’s the fifth element that gets people from different nationalities and places to speak about different subjects—mythologies, AIDS, diseases, politics, the universe, subterranean worlds. That’s the interesting part, changing different views, the ideologies, respecting all of the different religions. It’s something where we can, and whether it’s right or wrong, sit and talk to each other—and not kill each other.

You’re dealing with a machine that is controlling the minds of the masses of the people and keeping the people in poverty, teaching them to be greedy, stealing from each other’s land. That is the cause for so much of the chaos on our planet today. People of color get sick and tired and start to rise, and the people in power see this rising and try to hold on to power, doing all types of evilness in the name of their Creator to keep their power. Everybody talks about the war in Iraq. These people love Allah the Supreme Force, where others claim to love Jesus, but do everything except what’s in The Book. Everybody says that this is my holy book, but they don’t really follow it, so who are you following?

People got to go back and research who they are, their roots, and what happened. The biggest thing is the fear factor. They have made it now so you’re fearful to open your mouth, or to protest. When they first started the war, everybody thought if you were against the war, you would lose your job, they would lock you up. Everybody was nervous at first. But then you see the people get tired, the people hitting the streets again, all races and nationalities hitting it. People are still wondering how Bush stole the election.

What is really going on in your government, and what’s really behind your government, and who is controlling your mind, using mind control tactics? We’ve got to reevaluate what is really going on. In Africa, there is no way that anybody should go hungry, starving there, when the Creator blessed Africa with everything in it, every animal and being in it, the farmland, the trees…. Who is paying all that money to make sure that Africa stays starving or messed up when the whole world took their civilization from Africa? And really, for everyone on the planet, their mother really is African, if they go back and check the roots of it all.

The people in power are tricking the people; that they’ve got you under their rule, that you are my Hispanic, you are my black. If you try to go find it, where is black land, white land, yellow land—you can’t find it. It’s really about your status and your nationality and where you come from. Humans are the only ones that have this bugged out thing—that they are colors. Everybody has a place set for us, where we won’t be ourselves. They have wiped out history. When our Spanish brother says, ‘Look at that Mulatto, or the Moor,” you don’t know that you are mulatto, too. It’s going to take a big cleaning of our minds, our mentality, to go back to what it was like when people were trying to wake up, because they have done a great brainwash job on all of us, to make us hate ourselves or be fearful of ourselves. Or we have to move into their community to say that we finally made it, that we’re moving on up, like The Jeffersons.

Born in the Bronx

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

Anton Perich: True Revolutionary

Posted on July 27, 2010

Candy Darling, Photograph © Anton Perich

There’s so much I could say about Anton Perich, but it’s altogether too much for me to try to put it into words. I’ll leave it to the incomparable Mr. Perich to do this better than I ever could.

Your life history is fascinating! Please talk about your work running an underground film program in Paris in the late 1960s.

AP: Thank you. I was making some super 8 movies then. All lost now, except one, “Le retour d’ Eurydice”, in which I was starring. Raphael Bassan directed it. An early French underground film, recently screened at Beaubourg. This was 16mm production, and well preserved.

Anyway, there was this wonderful villa with gardens on Boulevard Raspail, just a few short blocks from La Coupolle. It was housing the old American Center, a complex of art studios and various music and theater activities. Later they tore it down to put the Carier skyscraper. I saw there many international productions and created a few. But one thing was missing, underground films. So I proposed to show films there one night weekly, in a small studio in the basement, and sometimes in the gardens, on the grass. It was a success. I was making films and my friends were making films and there was no place to show them regularly in Paris.

Of course, we were all spoiled by La Cinematheque, spending days there watching classics and contemporary films. But there was no room there for our “little short marginal works”. And of course, revolutions are always made by the marginals.

In the Sixties, the New York Underground cinema were well defined by Warhol, Mekas, Jack Smith, Brackage and others. A whole different scenario was happening in Paris. There was Godard and his gods reigning on the Parnassus, making a wonderful narrative movies, not much questioning Cinema itself. There was also Garell, Clemanti, And there was Etienne O’Leary and Michel Auder. The great Michel Auder, who questioned everything. In 1970 he abandoned film totally and converted to video. I screened his films there the very first night, and often afterwards. He supplied the projector that he somehow inherited from the French Army, I guess he knew de Gaulle, or was his nephew. Another great French underground filmmaker was Raphael Bassan. But the real revolution in Paris film world were maid in the Fifties by the last great god of the avant-garde, Isidore Isou and his prophet Maurice Lemaitre. In the early Fifties they made movies with the found footage, various acids and paints. They made the cinema discrepant, totally separating the sound track from the visual content, as if telling two different stories in the same time. Of course, most of the audience walked out. No one ever did it before. Debord took it all from them. Debord was Lettrist before he became Situationist.

Anyway, I screened some of those films too.

I was associated with Lettristes from 1967 to 1970. I worked with Lemaitre and Isou, painting, writing poetry, shooting films, doing the shows. Lettrism was my school. I was educated by the two greatest artists and thinkers of that time. Of course Isou predicted the 1968 revolution and went mad. We did some performances at L’Odeon, it was occupied, Non-stop 24 hours spectacle. I spent few nights there.

I think that the Revolution of 68, the Paris Spring is grossly misunderstood today. It was not the flesh and blood revolution, no guillotines. It was the revolution of spirit, of the young, so unique in the history of revolutions. It paved the way for other bloodless revolution in the Eastern Europe. Imagine, the Communism died the bloodless death. Tell it to Stalin, or Lenin.

I lived my own revolution there. I became something else at 23. It is difficult to transform oneself, only fantasy and revolution will do it. And spirit. And resurrection. And the fire in Paris streets. And “sous les paves la plage”. The greatest slogan ever written.

To get back to films, I did show some Warhol films, and Mekas.

The legendary Pierro Heliczer came from New York and introduced his films. Taka IImura came there with his films as well, and many other underground filmmakers, French and international.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Photograph © Anton Perich

Why did you decide to come to New York in the 1970s? What was the city like back then, particularly for artists and radicals?

AP: I came to New York in 1970. At that time I was interested in many things that were coming from New York. Underground films. Pop Art. Experimental theater. Warhol’s Factory. Jonas Mekas. Julian Beck. John Cage. John Chamberlain. Minimal Art. Earth Works. All of that new, foreign to the Europeans, miraculous and fascinating. It was all so American. Paris didn’t have any of that. It had a vacuum and suffocating atmosphere. They were mourning the revolution of 68 instead celebrating it.

In NY it was all celebration, non stop celebration of the young, creative and the free. Woodstock was a celebration. Max’s Kansas City was celebration. Punk was celebration, music, fashion and attitude. NY Dolls was celebration. Transvestites were celebration. Taylor Mead was celebration, Warhol, Factory, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Wayne County, Andrea Feldman, John Waters, John Chamberlain, John Cage. Lou Reed. Forest Myers was celebration. His SOHO wall was much better than that other wall in Berlin. And it is there forever in the full glory. Smithson and Heiser were doing God’s work, transforming the landscapes in the great vacuums of America.

Andrea Feldman, Photograph © Anton Perich

In 1973, you produced the first underground TV show which ran on Manhattan public access television. Please talk about your ideas about video art and how you made use of public access TV to explore them.

AP: I quit film and was shooting video. I realized that it was the gun of the future. I realized that the freedom to bear video was the same as the freedom to bear arms. And with a such powerful instrument you dream of changing the world. You dream revolution. You remember I came to NY via Paris and brought a symbolic cobble stone with me, you remember: “under the cobble stones the beach…”Other so called video artists were showing their videos at the galleries and museums, the most safe places in the world. I never had a video show in a gallery or museum. I would be ashamed of it. Such bourgeois establishments. Suffocating the freedoms that video was to bring.

I saw the video camera as the most subversive weapon on the world, and you don’t take it to the gallery, you take it to the American TV. There was Cronkite there and Barbara Walters, but you replace them with Taylor Mead, Danny Fields and Susan Blond. Naked aggressive and radical, hating everything the TV had to offer until that day. I did it on Public Access in January 1973, in the prehistoric times of video. I took my one hour weekly show “Anton Perich Presents” there.

I realized then that the free Public Access was like youtube today. As the matter of fact, like the Internet today. No one realized that it was so powerful, radical and transformative. TV was the last stronghold of American comfort and the superficial perfection. Clean as the soap commercials. But while the soap washed clothes, the TV bleached the brains. The absolute pristine color TV meets the badly produced black and white airings, badly filmed and with bad sound, badly dressed and badly behaved stars of the underground. The Television has never seen this content before. It was the first. Yes, I broke the ice. After me came the flood. Look at the cable today. Yes we made a revolution, single handedly. It was about freedom.

Charles James and Model, Photograph © Anton Perich

Please talk about the inspiration to start NIGHT Magazine in 1978. Why did you decide to get into publishing, and what was it like to produce print back in the days?

AP: Yes, it was all about inspiration. It was about poetry of the photograph. NIGHT was this wonderful title idea for a new, oversized underground publication. I designed it and published it. Absolutely oversized, glamorous, elegant, sensual on a smooth almost a bed sheet-size beautiful white paper. It was in 1978. I was at the Studio 54 shooting every night fabulous pictures of the most fabulous people in the World. For me photography is an obsession, the white substance.

I was shooting for the Warhol’s Interview magazine and for me that was not enough, so I had to self-publish, as it is called today. Well, it was marvelous to capture all this nightly energy on the pages of NIGHT. Hundreds, thousands of photos. From Victor Hugo to Patty Hansen and Jerry Hall. Bianca, Esme, Carole Bouquet. All dressed on the covers of VOGUE and topless in NIGHT.

I wanted to publish every photo I ever took. It was the Facebook for the Studio 54 regulars. But my photography here is something else. It is celebrated now, looking so fresh and contemporary, as if it was taken today. All great photography is timeless, looks like taken today, and not yesterday. The dated photographs don’t speak to me, cannot establish a communication with them. It is like yesterday’s papers. The paparazzi work. NIGHT is not a yesterday’s paper. It told the future over 30 years ago.

I still publish NIGHT today. It is my way of questioning the Internet. If we don’t question it and if we don’t doubt it we will end up in the near future having everything on our fingertips and nothing in our arms. NIGHT is not on your fingertips, it is in our arms, big beautiful, physical, not virtual. Hand-made, and not LED device.

Model wearing Charles James, Photograph © Anton Perich

Throughout this time you were also taking photographs of everyone on the scene, from Andy Warhol, Candy Darling, and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethrope, and Tennessee Williams. What was it like to photograph celebrities and personalities at that time?

AP: I didn’t photograph much celebrities, they were mostly tourists. At Studio 54 and Max’s. Truman was a regular, Bianca was a regular. I took only 2 photos of Basquiqt, one published on the first page and the other on the last page of his giant Milano catalogue. I photographed Andy for the only one reason, to capture his shyness. I photographed Candy endlessly just to capture the tranquility of her eyes. I photographed Mapplethorpe to capture l’enfant terrible. I photographed Patti Smith to capture Rimbaud or perhaps to capture the rainbow in the darkest corners of Max’s.

www.antonperich.com

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

Nat Finkelstein Shot the Velvet Underground

Posted on October 30, 2009

Who Shot Rock & Roll
A Photographic History, 1955–Present

By Gail Buckland

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH

ELIZABETH MURRAY FINKELSTEIN

Nat Finkelstein, American photographer and photojournalist, was born in Brooklyn in 1933. Starting off as a student of the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, Finkelstein worked for agencies like The Black Star and PIX. However Finkelstein is probably best known for his work with Andy Warhol, as his ‘unofficial’ in- house photographer, which is nowadays recognized as some of the best photographic work of the 20th century. Since then, Finkelstein has exhibited his work worldwide; among many other locations, his photographs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and The Andy Warhol Foundation, New York; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Nat Finkelstein passed away in early October 2009 in his home in Upstate New York. He was 76 years old.

Elizabeth Murray Finkelstein discusses her husband’s work, Velvet Underground and Friends, 1966, selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

I can imagine you must have mixed emotions, with Nat having recently passed, and the responsibility of running his archive falling to you just as Who Shot Rock & Roll launches. How do you feel about being the spokesperson on behalf of Nat and his work?

Elizabeth Murray Finkelstein: Nat and I had a pact through our marriage: I would protect both his art and his legacy. Because he was significantly older than me—he died at 76, I’m 35—we knew the reality of the situation. I would live to carry on his work, a responsibility I take very seriously.

When I met Nat, he was living in a horrible situation, in a gross apartment under the BQE, depressed and with few prospects for the future. I looked around through this squalid place and there was his artwork. I recognized genius and asked him, “You did all THIS?” And Nat answered, “Yeah, but nobody cares.” He broke my heart. With that, I made it our mission to get his life together and to re-establish him as an ARTIST. I think we did OK.

This project really brings my relationship to Nat full circle, as it was through his work at The Factory in the mid 60s that we first connected. Although neither you nor I were there for it, Nat sure as hell was, and though he is gone, his work continues to live on. Can you describe for us how Nat felt about photographing the Factory and its denizens?

Ironically, perhaps, Nat and Andy Warhol had a common background. Both were children of the Depression, of working class families, who found their voice through their vision. Nat respected Andy – I think Nat knew where Andy was coming from, as an artist and maybe also as a person. Nat was a well-established photojournalist in the 1960s, and Andy knew Nat’s name through photo credits in magazines. When they met, both probably recognized the mutual benefit. I’ve reminded a few haters that it was Andy who wanted Nat at the Factory. And Nat knew a good story when he saw one.

There were qualities of the Factory that Nat really loved: brilliant art, beautiful women, and the Velvet Underground. These are the subjects on which he focused his camera. But he believed the Factory ultimately represented the soft underbelly of the American underground. In 1965, Nat was also photographing, and organizing anti-Vietnam War and civil rights activity—ugly scenes of young and old violently oppressed by the powers that were. In contrast, Nat said that political struggle was of no concern at the silver Factory, where celebrity for its own sake was a common goal. He derisively called the arch-scenesters “the Satellites”—those who existed only to revolve around a bigger star.

Nat described the Velvet Underground as “the psychopath’s Rolling Stones.” Please elaborate…

The Psychopath’s Rolling Stones… Ha! In 1966, Nat used that phrase in his book proposal for the Andy Warhol Index. He was a huge fan of the Rolling Stones, so he wasn’t being derogatory or demeaning—he was being pithy. However, Nat told me that Lou Reed was totally offended when he read this. Obviously, the VU were doing their own thing, but Lou thought the comparison to the Stones diminished their uniqueness. And so, as per Nat, Lou Reed responded, “The three worst people in the world are Nat Finkelstein and two speed dealers.” Touché! Nat claimed Lou never forgave him for the “psychopath” quote. That’s sad, because Nat truly cared for the VU as people, as individuals. He was proud of their accomplishments. But he felt he had been iced out—dismissed or betrayed. In the last years of Nat’s life, Eden Cale, daughter of John, became our very close friend. Nat and John reconnected through Eden, which meant a lot to Nat.

Critic Ian Johnston describes Nat’s photo of the Velvet Underground as “…among the best ever portraits of a rock band, exuding sleaze, menace, and decadent glamour.” What are your thoughts on this image, and how well it has stood the test of time?

Nat has maybe 1,000 photographs of the VU—everything from group shots, to performances, to candid portraits of the individuals. As a photographic study of a rock & roll band—a body of work—it may be unparalleled in scope.

The image in Who Shot Rock & Roll was from a group portrait session; we have a few contact sheets from this shoot, which we referred to as “VU with Vox.” As for the far-reaching influence of these photos, I’m reminded of an email we got several years ago. A VU fan from England, I believe, wrote to ask if Nat had any photographs of the Vox speaker by itself. The fan wanted to know if a legend about the alteration of the Vox knobs was true, and if Nat had photographic evidence. Nat’s response was, “Do you want to buy a photograph?” To which the fan responded, “I just want to know if the story is true.”

I was a fan of the Velvet Underground long before I knew Nat Finkelstein. I didn’t know Nat’s name. I certainly didn’t know he would be my husband—but I knew his pictures. Nat’s photographs are the visual component to the VU story. Despite the arguments and estrangements, Nat and the VU are inextricably linked in history. As long as the Velvet Underground is relevant, which I imagine is forever, Nat’s photographs will remain relevant, too. Great art is timeless.

Categories: 1960s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Photography

My Man, Nat Finkelstein 1933–2009, May He Rest in Peace

Posted on October 7, 2009

Lemme tell you about my man Nat Finkelstein the kinkiest kid Brooklyn has ever seen. I met him in 2000, he called the office one day to talk with the bosses about his new book for Fall, a Warhol book about the Factory’s earliest days, when the original King of Pop still made his own paintings. Days of desultory decadence that Nat cuts to shreds in his book, The Factory Years, which is now out of print. He signed my book: Heed the cry of the mutant “I need others like me”.

Indeed.

Born in Coney Island, Brooklyn in 1933, Nat Finkelstein was a graduate of Stuyvesant High School and attended Brooklyn College. He blew me away when he dropped this gem on me: homeboy studied photography and design under Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar. What was this crazy BK boy up to anyway ? How did he connect with Warhol ?

Turns out Nat worked as a photojournalist for the PIX and Black Star photo agencies. In 1964, he got an assignment to enter Andy Warhol’s Factory as a journalist. He didn’t leave for three years. Not until he left his mark, with the first photos of the Velvet Underground, who he called “The Psychopath’s Rolling Stones,” then with shots of Edie Sedgwick, and then finally for being the dude who introduced Valerie Solanis to Andy Warhol. A big mark indeed.

Finkelstein abruptly retired from photography in 1969, when a federal warrant was issued for his arrest, due to the incendiary nature of his civil rights activity. He left the United States, and lived as a fugitive for fifteen years, following the Silk Road through the Middle East. I’ve read some of the stories: Morocco in the late 60s, Kandahar in 71; the sort of things you’d never believe, except Nat had proof. He had his photos.

Eventually, all charges against Finkelstein were dismissed, and he returned to New York City in 1982, resuming his photographic career in galleries worldwide. While best known for his images of Warhol’s Factory, Finkelstein’s documented stories as wide ranging as civil rights protests for Life Magazine in the 1960s to the “club kid” scene of the 1990s. His monographs include The Andy Warhol Index (with Warhol, 1968), Girlfriends (1991), Merry Monsters (1993), Andy Warhol: The Factory Years (2000) and Edie Factory Girl (2006).

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Finkelstein’s photographs are in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Smithsonian Institute, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, among many other public and private collections. His work can be seen in upcoming exhibitions, including “Who Shot Rock” at the Brooklyn Museum this Fall, and a retrospective at Idea Generation, London in December 2009.

Nat Finkelstein passed peacefully at his home in Upstate New York on Friday October 2, 2009. He was 76. Rest in Peace, Nat. You were a true original. A rebel and a renegade, an artist and a ladies man, a brilliant thinker, a crazed Tasmanian devil, and one of the funniest, most on-point people I have ever had the pleasure to know. And I am so glad you had the good sense to marry Elizabeth, as she will carry the torch and torch the flag. Whatever it takes to make things happen.

Artnet

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