The Aftermath: How Postwar Artists in Britain Responded to Collective Experience

Full Stop (1961) The Estate of John Latham/Tate 

‘Am I standing on my head, or is the world upside down?’
Franciszka Themerson

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of art created in Britain in the wake of the Second World War. (‘Postwar Modern’ is at the Barbican, London until 26 June.)

The show features the work of 48 artists: paintings, sculpture, photography, collage and installations. We witness how, over a twenty-year period, a creative community responded to the world around it - initially with shock and horror at the recent past, and then with growing confidence about future possibilities.

On entering the first gallery, we are greeted by a sombre symphony in black. There’s an agonised Christ on the cross by Francis Newton Souza. There are the vaporized heads of Eduardo Paolozzi. And there’s a big bleak ‘Full Stop’ by John Latham – like a bullet wound or an eclipsed planet or a black hole. 

It’s grim stuff.

Perhaps that’s entirely understandable, given the upheaval and destruction that people had witnessed. The war had blitzed cities and blown away certainties, leaving an anxious world under a nuclear cloud. Britain had become a home for refugees from Nazism and migrants from its now crumbling empire.

‘The 1950s found most of us in London, each of us independently examining the images left in our minds and souls in the aftermath of World War II. In some sense we felt that new images might help us to prevent the repetition of the inhuman and unseemly past. It was with some excitement, then, that we approached the new and tried to erase the old.’
Magda Cordell

Artists depicted the dereliction, damage and decay that they saw all around them. William Turnbull, who had been a fighter pilot, created desolate relief landscapes in bronze. Bill Hardy photographed kids playing in urban bombsites. Elizabeth Frink sculpted strange, monstrous, menacing birds. 

‘They actually became something else…They became like bits of shrapnel and flying things…with very sharp beaks.’
Elizabeth Frink

There are not many portraits of people here. Rather artists reconfigured the human body from abstract shapes and machine parts. Magda Cordell painted pulsating internal organs in bold crimson. Inspired by television and science fiction, John McHale imagined a family of wired cyborgs. 

‘We extend out psychic mobility. We can telescope time, move through history, span the world through visual and aural means.’
John McHale

First Contact, 1958 by John McHale

Some sought a completely new visual language, experimenting with industrial materials like sheet metal, Perspex and household paint. Mary Martin created pure white reliefs, austere, abstract geometric forms. Victor Pasmore abandoned figurative painting and threw himself into work prompted by science, geometry and mathematics. 

‘Today the whole world is shaken by the spirit of reconstruction… In painting and sculpture, as also in architecture, an entirely new language has been formed.’
Victor Pasmore

In time artists began to document the budding new society that was rising from the rubble. Jewish refugees Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff presented the city under construction, in thick layers of earth-toned paint. Eva Frankfurther portrayed ordinary workers at the Lyons Corner House, weary and pensive. Shirley Baker photographed the street life of multicultural Manchester and Roger Mayne celebrated London’s emergent youth culture – poor, but cool and fun-loving. 

‘West Indian Waitresses’ by Eva Frankfurther c1955. Photo Courtesy of the Ben Uri Gallery.

And there was a spirit of righteous rebellion in the air. Francis Bacon and David Hockney referenced their homosexuality in their work, despite the fact that it was still illegal.

‘What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that I felt hadn’t been propagandised… homosexuality. I felt it should be done.’
David Hockney

Gradually colours became brighter and bolder. Patrick Heron painted radiant abstract landscapes. Gillian Ayres produced intense organic shapes, full of feeling and possibility.

‘A shape – a relationship – a body – oddness – shock – mood – cramped – isolated – acid – sweet – encroaching – pivoting – fading – bruised.’
Gillian Ayres

Detail of Gillian Ayres, Break-off

And so we arrive in the ‘60s, a decade of fearless innovation and wild experimentation; of mobiles, installations, auto-creation and rotating sculptures. The shadows of the war have for the most part departed.

We often characterise artists as solitary individuals, ploughing their own furrows, expressing their own unique perspectives. But what struck me about this exhibition was the extent to which the creative community was responding, together, to the times in which they were working. These artists were challenging social norms and being challenged by collective experience. They were fully immersed in their environment.

In the sphere of commerce, brands sometimes seem to exist in their own secluded space; articulating their own particular point of view, untouched by cultural or competitive forces. This show suggests to me that brands must breathe the same air as their consumers; they must feel their anxieties, share their enthusiasms. Brands must participate in society, not stand aloof from it. 

‘Postwar Modern’ deals in the aftermath of war. Aftermath is an appropriate word. It was originally an agricultural term: ‘a second crop or new growth of grass (or occas. another plant used as feed) after the first has been mown or harvested.’(OED).

Aftermath suggests rebirth and renewal. Even in the darkest times, there is hope.

'Yes, we're different, worlds apart.
We're not the same.
We laughed it away
At the start, like in a game.
You could have stayed
Outside my heart,
But in you came.
And here you'll stay,
Until it's time for you to go.’
Buffy Sainte-Marie, 'Until It's Time for You to Go'

No. 370

Robert Moses, ‘Trapped in a Dream’: How a Leader Can Go from Hero to Villain

Robert Moses, urban planner. Roosevelt Island, New York, 1959.Credit...Arnold Newman/Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

Moses: The dynamo of capitalism is restlessness. Nothing is ever enough. For us, nothing is ever settled. We are always on the move.

I recently watched ‘Straight Line Crazy,’ a fine new David Hare play about the urban planner Robert Moses. (The Bridge Theatre, London until 18 June)

Moses: Once Americans cease to believe they can remake America better, then it ceases to be America.

Though he was never elected to any public office, Moses was often described as the most powerful man in New York. As head of the New York City and Long Island State Parks Commissions between 1924 and 1963 (along with holding many other official roles), he built a system of 627 miles of expressway, connecting the city to the great outdoors. He created bridges, parks and swimming pools.He led the construction of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs in New York and helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in Manhattan. 

Moses: A leader makes the mood, he’s not a victim of it.

Moses began his career with an avowed intent to improve the lives of ordinary city dwellers. But he ended it a pariah - criticised for the destruction of communities to make way for his road schemes; for his unwavering commitment to the car; for his refusal to embrace mass transit; for his disregard for public opinion.

Moses: Your principal error is this: to imagine that the people’s views are of any importance at all…We must advance their fortunes without having any respect for their opinions.

Moses provides a case study in how a leader’s resolute commitment to a vision can evolve into intransigence and anachronism; how a hero can over time become a villain.

Moses: People may not like me, but they need me… I’d rather be right and alone, than be soft and with other people.

Robert Moses with a model lower end of Manhattan and the bridge with which it is proposed to connect Battery Park with Brooklyn, March 1939. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The play focuses on two significant years in Moses’ life: 1926 and 1955.

We begin with a young Moses planning a scheme to build two big expressways across Long Island. Alert to changing social needs and aspirations, he wants to give New Yorkers access to the region’s woods, open spaces and beaches.

Moses: The people have discovered a new occupation. It’s called leisure. And one day it will be as popular as work.

Long Island is peaceful, sparsely populated and controlled by a few aristocratic families who are united in their opposition to his scheme. Moses has learnt that in order to get any project off the ground, he needs to be comfortable with confrontation and conflict.

Moses: People characteristically revolt against any innovation…Nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved without initial resistance.

Indeed Moses is prepared to press ahead with road construction ahead of attaining final sign-off.

Moses: Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up. Public work relies on one thing. Impetus… Anyone can argue about where a freeway ought to be. But it’s pretty damn hard to argue about where it is.

Moses is highly intelligent, hard working, rational and uncompromising. He has fixed views, and is particularly convinced of the liberating power of the motor car.

Moses: People like cars. You own something and you’re in control. That’s a nice feeling. When I was young, America was sitting there, like a tin can. The car was the can opener. Still is.

Though Moses is reserved, socially awkward and wary of the public stage, he is driven by a fundamentally democratic urge. 

Moses: I’m in a hurry, and I’m in a hurry to help – to help the millions out there who have no access to a good life. And if a few fences get kicked over in the process, does that really matter?

At length Moses achieves his objective on Long Island with the help of a supportive Governor, a sympathetic New York Times and an amenable judge. 

The play then leaps ahead to 1955. Moses is proposing to put a four-lane highway through Washington Square in Manhattan. The scheme will alleviate traffic congestion in the area and create horizontal routes to match the existing vertical expressways.

Moses: What kind of city have we created where roads run up and down, but nothing runs across? …It’s an offence against logic and against reason.

Moses has little regard for the impact the development will have on the local neighbourhoods.

Moses: Things must exist for a purpose. SoHo has no purpose. Vitality is dependent on function. And when function decays, so does life.

However, Moses comes up against a group of community activists, foremost amongst whom is architectural journalist and writer Jane Jacobs. She challenges his view that the automobile should drive decisions about urban development. And she thinks he is ‘straight line crazy.’

Jacobs: Mr Moses is a man under hypnosis. He got hypnotized at the age of twenty-five by two ideas and they’re both delusions. First, he has this insane idea that the answer to the problem of too many cars is more cars. And second, he’s convinced the answer to the problem of congestion on our roads is more roads.

Jacobs believes cities are vibrant, organic ecosystems that should be planned from the bottom-up. 

Jacobs as chair of a Greenwich Village civic group at a 1961 press conference

Jacobs: Cities grow up. They just happen. Bit by bit. Hand a city to the planners and they’ll make it a desert. Hand it to the people and they’ll make it habitable. Robert Moses looks at the West Village and he sees a slum. I look at the West Village and I see a healthy neighbourhood. I see life.

We realise that Moses’ forceful, top-down style of leadership, which once made him so successful, now represents an impediment. He has lost touch with public sentiment. He’s a man out of time.

Moses: The people lack imagination. The job of the leader is to provide it.

Ultimately Moses is defeated by an alliance of middle-class campaigners, political progressives and broader public opinion. In the play his long-time colleague Finnuala Connell (a fictional character) summarises the cause of his demise.

Finnuala: Once you believed in cars because you thought they would liberate people. Now you force people into cars and you force cars onto roads because you want to be vindicated. It’s no longer about the people. It’s about you…You’re stuck. You’re stuck with an idea you had thirty years ago. And you can’t move on. Is there anything worse than being trapped in a dream?

Robert Moses provides a lesson for us all. Leaders need insight into cultural change, a vision that addresses that change, a strategy to deliver and the iron will to see things through. Moses had all these capabilities. But as the world evolved, his views remained the same. What once was self-confidence became arrogance; what once was resolve became intransigence. He loved progress, but only in the direction he envisaged. He liked to regard the city from a distance, from above: all grand schemes, expansive concepts and logical systems. But the broader his perspective, the less room it had for empathy and community. And in the end he was wrong.

This does not mean however that Moses’ opponents were entirely right. At the close of the play Jacobs reflects on the fact that theirs was a hollow victory.

Jacobs: Our efforts to preserve Greenwich Village and SoHo succeeded in transforming it into the most expensive piece of real estate in the world. What was once a community was cleansed of everyone but the rich. The Village was saved, but it was also destroyed.

[If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, I’d recommend the 2016 documentary about Jane Jacobs, ‘Citizen Jane: Battle for the City’.]

'Oh, can't anybody see,
We've got a war to fight?
Never found our way,
Regardless of what they say.
How can it feel this wrong?
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong?’’

Portishead, ‘Roads’ (B Gibbons / A Utley / G Barrow)

No. 369

A Studio of One’s Own: Designing an Environment for Ideas

Helen Frankenthaler in 1957, photographed by Gordon Parks. © The Gordon Parks Foundation

'No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.’
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’

I recently attended an excellent exhibition examining the artist’s studio over the last one hundred years. (‘A Century of the Artist’s Studio’, curated by Iwona Blazwick, runs at the Whitechapel Gallery until 5 June.) 

Through a selection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, films and reconstructions, the show considers the diverse characteristics of a successful creative workspace.

A studio can be an attic, a loft apartment or a spare room; a shed, a farmhouse or a disused factory. It is a place for escape, reflection, experimentation and creation; a location for catalysts and stimulus, for intimate exchange; a scene for collaboration and collective effort. 

No surprise perhaps that studios often feature in artists’ work. Wheelchair-bound Frida Kahlo painted herself painting her doctor. Mequitta Ahuja depicted herself bent over her desk, deep in thought. Lucien Freud’s portraits often included his own furniture. Bruce Nauman filmed a man dancing on the perimeter of a square marked out on his workshop floor. 

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2008, Acrylic on PVC panel in artist’s frame, 73 x 62.9 cm. Collection of Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III. © Kerry James Marshall.

'I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.’
Joan Miro

A painting by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham presents us with an image of a clean, well-lit studio, a blank canvas waiting at the easel. But the norm for most artists seems to have been much more chaotic. The walls of Francis Bacon’s workspace were daubed in paint, the floor strewn with passport photographs and Polaroids of lovers; with old newspapers and pages torn from magazines and medical textbooks. 

Studios are often expressions of an artist’s personality and creative style. Robert Rauschenberg’s looked like a tip, Jackson Pollock splattered paint everywhere. Here’s half-naked Picasso surrounded by his canvases, revelling in his genius.

Studios often include props and prompts for inspiration. Matisse liked to work alongside the same jugs, ornaments and textiles. Sculptor Kim Lim carefully pinned images that interested him to a board. 

'I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.’
Albert Einstein

Mequitta Ahuja, Notation, 2017 (detail). Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 182.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.

Studios can be a hub for exchanging ideas, a centre for a creative scene. Andy Warhol’s silver walled Factory played host to parties and Velvet Underground gigs. Wolfgang Tillmans photographed his loft space after a late night event - a mess of Malboro packs, Peroni bottles and Stella cans.

But studios are also a retreat, where the artist can process thought and work things out in private. Alberto Giacometti sketched ideas on the walls. Alexander Calder’s workshop looked like a garage where he could tinker away endlessly at his mobiles.  

'When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.’
John Cage

The studio of Francis Bacon, ‘luminous dabs blossoming across the walls’. Photograph: Perry Ogden © The Estate of Francis Bacon All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021

For Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant the studio was their home. They painted their fireplaces, walls and screens, filled the space with their own furniture, pictures and pottery, blurring the lines between art and craft, between figurative and abstract. Kurt Schwitter turned his house in Hanover into an art installation: a magical white wooden cave of stalagmites and stalagtites. 

Kurt Schwitters’ Hanover Merzbau

'Room service? Send up a larger room.’ 
Groucho Marx

I left the exhibition reflecting that our offices are rather bland, anodyne, corporate affairs - all polite modern furniture, brightly coloured walls, ping pong tables and witty atrium displays. Not that different from our Clients’ workspaces. 

A properly creative business should be a place for stimulus and inspiration, for experimentation and discovery; a place that enables privacy and seclusion, but also congregation and exchange. Surely a creative business should have a creative environment.

At the exhibition there’s a fabulous 1957 photo of Helen Frankenthaler by Gordon Parks. Sitting on her studio floor, her head resting on one hand, she regards us with quiet confidence. She is surrounded on all sides by her paintings – big, soft and colourful; fluid, organic and abstract. Her studio seems to have become her art. It projects and protects her. It just seems to be her.

'I've really got to use my imagination
To think of good reasons
To keep on keepin’ on. 
Got to make the best of a bad situation,
Ever since that day I woke up and found
That you were gone.’
Gladys Knight & the Pips, 'I’ve Got to Use My Imagination’ (B Goldberg / G Goffin)

No.368

The Fertile Metaphor: Louise Bourgeois and ‘The Woven Child’

Louise Bourgeois: The Good Mother (detail), 2003 © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photography by Christopher Burke

'I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.'
Louise Bourgeois

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the fabric art of Louise Bourgeois. (‘The Woven Child’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 15 May.)

The show collects the textile-based work Bourgeois created in the last two decades of her life: a multiplicity of sculptures, installations, collages and embroidery that revisit the traumas of her childhood and her complex feelings about her family. It is all the more powerful given the age of the artist and the distinctiveness of her chosen media.

‘My subject is the rawness of the emotions, the devastating effect of the emotions you go though.’

Bourgeois, born in 1911, grew up in the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le Roi, where her parents ran a workshop that repaired antique tapestries.

‘My mother would sit out in the sun and repair a tapestry or a petit point. She really loved it. This sense of reparation is very deep within me.’

Louise Bourgeois: Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001

In her eighties and living in New York (which had been her home since 1938), Bourgeois took her mother’s old clothes and some of her own, and redeployed them in her art. Delicate white camisoles, underwear and nightgowns; a pale pink blouse, a red apron and a little black dress were suspended from hangers, hooks and bones, in oppressive constructed rooms and cages, accompanied by two large white marble spheres, a small model of her childhood home and lurking spiders. 

‘You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, weight, the color, the smell of the clothes in your closet.’

These are rather disturbing domestic pieces - claustrophobic, soaked in secrets and lies; memory and loss. Bourgeois was haunted by her childhood: by her father’s brazen infidelities with a string of women, including her governess; by her sick mother’s quiet acceptance; by her own sense of impotence and confinement.

‘Sewing implies repairing. There is a hole…you have to hide the damage…you have to hide the urge to do damage. There is a background of drama here… that something bad you must have done must be undone. I sew… I do what I can.’

Bourgeois repeatedly returned to the metaphor of fabric and weaving. Throughout her work she included scissors, bobbins, threads and needles; scraps of fading tapestry. Sewing implies mending. Seams are like scars. Clothes suggest second skins. Stuffed fabric prompts associations with soft flesh and fragile emotions. 

‘The needle is used to repair the damage. It’s a claim to forgiveness. It’s never aggressive, it’s not a pin.’

And though her spiders seem at first sinister and threatening, for Bourgeois they represented creation, restoration and motherhood.

'The spider is a repairer. If you bash the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.’

Bourgeois made stuffed heads covered in bright, colourful material: wincing, screaming, kissing; sometimes seeming masked and gagged. The pained head of her brother Pierre, who was institutionalized with mental illness, is loosely stitched - as if to suggest he is coming apart at the seams. 

‘I had a flashback of something that never existed.’

Louise Bourgeois: Pierre

There are twisted torsos hanging limp, copulating couples, body parts sagging with age. There are embroideries of flowers and clocks, collages of abstract patterns and spider’s webs. Bourgeois arranged cushion-like shapes in neat columns, perhaps trying to impose order on a chaotic world.

‘It is a world that is not going to disappoint me because I am building it myself. I am the author of my own world with its internal logic and with its value that no one can deny.’

What particularly struck me about the exhibition was that Bourgeois had been inspired to such variety of thought and depth of feeling by one broad theme. Weaving is a fertile metaphor. 

This may resonate with those of us working in the fields of commercial creativity. When we invent brand worlds and campaign ideas, we should fully explore the opportunity for texture and nuance. A well-chosen metaphor contains layers of meaning. It suggests a diversity of interpretations. It offers rich rewards.

Louise Bourgeois

‘My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery and it has never lost its drama. I refuse to let go of that period because, painful as it was, it was life itself.’

In the late 1930s Bourgeois ran her own gallery in Paris. In 1945 she had her first solo show. In the 1950s she exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists in New York. And yet she was marginalised by the art establishment. Only gradually through the 1970s did she receive recognition, and only in 1982 was she given her first retrospective - at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

'You learn for yourself, not for others, not to show off, not to put the other one down. Learning is your secret, it is all you have, it is the only thing you can call your own. Nobody can take it away.'

Bourgeois died in 2010, aged 98. She finished her last pieces the week before. Although her work had explored pain, anxiety and loss, she consistently returned to a message of repair and restoration. We all deserve a second chance.

‘The repair of a tapestry or a costume is precisely a plea in favor of a second chance, it is a plea in favor of x and against y.’

'Back through the years
I go wonderin' once again
Back to the seasons of my youth.
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us,
And how my momma put the rags to use.
There were rags of many colors,
Every piece was small.
And I didn't have a coat,
And it was way down in the fall.
Momma sewed the rags together,
Sewin' every piece with love.
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of.’

Dolly Parton, ‘Coat of Many Colors'

No. 367

Changing the Conversation: William Forsythe, Kinetic Energy and Intense Emotion

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

'I don't care so much about choreography, I care about dancing.'
William Forsythe

I recently watched a splendid double bill of William Forsythe’s dance works performed by the English National Ballet (at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London).

The American choreographer has taken the vocabulary of traditional classical ballet steps, cut it up and reconfigured it around contemporary music. In so doing, he has created dance of radiant beauty and unconfined joy.

‘You have to remember that the origins of classical ballet lie in fetes, in social celebrations. I wanted to make a celebration for today.’

Blake Works 1 is set to the mournful melodies of James Blake. Bleak romantic sentiments, articulated in luminous fragments through a fog of electronic effects. Playlist (EP) is danced with elegant precision, to the disco, house and neo-soul of Barry White, Peven Everett, Natalie Cole and others. 

'I don't live here anymore.
Put that away, and talk to me.
I'm not the only one with a fantasy.
As lonely as you feel right now,
Put that away, and talk to me.’
James Blake, 'Put That Away, and Talk To Me'

Precious Adams and James Streeter in Playlist by William Forsythe. Photograph: Laurent Liotardo

Twenty, and then more than thirty, dancers of extraordinary athleticism occupy the stage, the women in fuchsia pink, the men in claret and blue. They are together as one, relishing their own technique, all high kicks and long extensions, carefree and yet in crisp time - and with the occasional playful flourish. It’s completely dazzling, entirely exhilarating.

‘All these dancers are Olympic-level athletes, truly Olympian.’

Some years ago I attended a party where there was a group of ballet dancers on their night off. As the sounds of Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King and Shalamar boomed out from the stereo, they took to the floor. They were, of course, nimble and refined. But they were also deliberate, accurate, controlled. No mindless swaying or primal boogie for them. They were not lost in music; they were consciously inhabiting it. And this is what made them so compelling to watch. 

'It’s intellectual and it’s physical. In other words, you use your body to solve problems, and these problems are basically physics problems.’

In an interview with Sarah Crompton of The Times, Forsythe, now 72, explained how he approached his iconic 1987 work, ‘In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated.’

‘The ballet steps were the alphabet. What I did was put them in novel arrangements, taking them out of their usual sequences. Basically, I was surprising the expert reader. That’s how I changed the conversation.’

I like the analogy of changing the conversation. We all sometimes find ourselves, at work and play, trapped in discussions that are tedious, familiar, irrelevant. Often we sit passively in silence, feeling frustrated, constrained by a sense of impotence and inertia. But it is possible to shift the direction of a discourse: by bridging to another theme, by raising a seductive subject, by proposing an amusing gambit. It just takes skill, timing and courage.

Brands too should recognise that they don’t have to accept the codes and customs of their sector. If they are innovative and seditious - if they have a genuinely fresh perspective - then they can rewrite the language, reframe the dialogue and create a new set of conventions. Bold brands change the conversation.

As Forsythe suggests, we experience more intense emotions when we move.

'As human beings we're a little bit more inclined to feel an intensity when we’re involved in any kind of kinesis.’

‘You can suffer me to lay it on the line,
How I feel, though you can see it in my eyes.
Think about you when I see you stuck in time.
Freeze on the mind, neon devotion.
I never ever try to hide the way I feel.
You know I can’t resist that private sex appeal,
All that you reveal for me.
Surely, surely, surely you know,
You’re what I want.’
Peven Everett, ‘Surely Shorty’

No. 366

Andre Leon Talley: ‘The Past Is Always in the Present’



André Leon Talley: Photo: Squire Fox/August

‘I don’t live for fashion. I live for beauty and style.’
Andre Leon Talley

On the death earlier this year of fashion journalist, editor and stylist Andre Leon Talley, I watched the 2017 documentary ‘The Gospel According to Andre’ (directed by Kate Novack).

'People need to be edited. Life needs to be edited. I need to be edited.'

Talley was a tastemaker, a raconteur, a permanent fixture at catwalk shows for more than four decades. He was the creative director of US Vogue, a close confidant of Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and Paloma Picasso, a style consultant to Michelle Obama. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of fashion history and he drew on an extraordinary breadth of cultural references. He was a rare Black man in a predominantly white world. 

‘Andre is one of the last of those great editors who know what they’re looking at, know what they’re seeing, know where it came from.’
Tom Ford
We can learn a great deal from Talley’s journey to the top of the fashion runway.

1. ‘You Can Be Aristocratic Without Having Been Born into an Aristocratic Family’

‘It was an amazing life based on narrative and anecdotes.’

Born in Washington DC in 1948, Talley was raised by his grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, in Durham, North Carolina. Davis, for 50 years a cleaner at nearby Duke University, was a stylish woman with exacting standards.

‘My grandmother taught me about dignity and values and striving for excellence; rigour, discipline, maintenance; cleanliness next to godliness. It’s aristocratic in the highest sense of the word. You can be aristocratic without having been born into an aristocratic family.’

Highlight of the week for the young Talley was the fashion parade that he witnessed at his local church.

‘Going to church was the most important thing in life. Getting up and getting dressed to go to church on Sunday.’

Aged nine Talley discovered Vogue in the Durham public library. The magazine opened the door to a romantic world of elegance, taste and invention. He read it avidly, tore pages out and stuck them on his bedroom walls. 

‘My escape from reality was Vogue magazine…  It made me think about style, culture, poetry, music, beauty.’

Talley and Diana Ross dancing

2. ‘Success is the Best Revenge’

Growing up in the segregated South, racism was a daily reality. Talley remembered how at Jo Belles store in Durham only the Black women were asked to wear protective veils when they tried on the hats. On one occasion, walking to collect his copy of Vogue from a newsstand on the white side of town, he was pelted with stones by a group of students.

At all-Black Hillside High School, Talley was taught that ‘success is the best revenge.’

‘Excellence without an excuse.’
‘You couldn’t be good. You had to be better.’

Enchanted by the way chef Julia Child said ‘Bon appetit!’ on her TV cookery show, Talley gravitated towards French culture. He studied French Literature at North Carolina Central University and went on to earn a scholarship in the same subject at Brown University, where he graduated with a Masters in 1972. 

‘I knew I had to get out of Durham… Brown gave me a freedom, a liberation and propelled me into the world that I know.’

3. ’The Past Is Always In the Present'

While at Brown, Talley socialised with students from the Rhode Island School of Design and wrote about its vibrant fashion set for the college magazine. 

‘Luxury is in your mind.’

Through his new connections, in 1974 Talley attained an apprenticeship with Diana Vreeland, legendary former editor-in-chief at US Vogue, who was then curating exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute. The two struck up a close rapport.

‘She taught me the language of clothes, the language of style.’

At the Costume Institute Talley learned that an understanding of history is the foundation for an understanding of fashion. In years to come his commentary on catwalk shows was embroidered with diverse references: Beau Brummell, Oscar Wilde and Lady Ottoline Morrell; Josephine Baker, Madame Gres, Visconti and Dorothy Dandridge; Tsarist Russia, Belle Epoque Paris and Swinging London. 

'I take my story with me wherever I go. The past is always in the present.'

Photo By PL Gould/ Getty Images

4. ‘Dare to Be Daring’

Soon Vreeland had secured Talley a receptionist’s job at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. He found himself at the heart of ‘70s New York’s decadent social scene.

‘The word promiscuous doesn’t begin to touch it. We thought sex was good for you – like orange juice.’ 
Fran Lebowitz

Talley’s role at Interview gave him access to a galaxy of creative stars: Calvin Klein, Gianni Versace, Stephen Burrows, Anna Piaggi, Pat Cleveland.  

‘I was inspired by people who dared to be daring.’

5. ‘See the World through the Kaleidoscope Eyes of a Child’

In 1975 Talley interviewed Karl Lagerfeld and impressed the designer with his knowledge and research. He subsequently secured a job at Women's Wear Daily, becoming in 1978 its Paris bureau chief.

6ft 7in tall, poised and elegant, Talley cut a dash on the Paris scene. He made extravagant gestures and dressed flamboyantly in shorts, seersucker jackets, sable coats and fedora hats; pinstripe suits, silk scarves, turbans and trenchcoats.

Talley: Fashion should have more joie de vivre.
Interviewer: But why don’t we see it on the street?
Talley: Darling, it depends on which street you’re walking on…and what time of day it is.

Admitted to the inner circle of Yves Saint Laurent and fluent in the local language, Talley thrived in the French capital.

‘You have to see the world through the kaleidoscope eyes of a child and just be in awe of everything.’

6. ‘Make People Feel the Dream’

In 1983 Talley joined US Vogue where he soon established a decades-long partnership with editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour. He was promoted from news editor to creative editor to editor-at-large.

Wintour recognised the value of Talley’s familiarity with fashion heritage.

‘My fashion history is not so great, and his is impeccable, so I think I learnt a lot from him.'
Anna Wintour

Talley wrote articles, arranged shoots, brokered interviews and negotiated covers. He had an instinct for the zeitgeist and a natural ability to communicate his love of clothes to a broader public.

‘No one really needs another handbag or another sweater or another coat. It has to be emotional. And Andre could always make people feel that dream and feel that emotion.’
Anna Wintour

After his grandmother’s death in 1989 Talley struggled with his weight. He increasingly wore the theatrical capes and kaftans that became his trademark. In 2013 he finally left Vogue and withdrew to his home in White Plains.  Believing that he had been frozen out by Wintour - for being ‘too old, too overweight, too uncool’ - he hit back in a 2020 memoir, ‘The Chiffon Trenches’. He died of a heart attack aged 73.

‘You have to hydrate yourself with beauty and luxury and style.’

Andre Leon Talley rose to the top of his profession through prodigious talent and mental toughness. He was a luminous character - funny, intelligent and bold - a passionate advocate for the power of fashion to uplift the soul.

‘Voltaire says one must cultivate one’s own garden… You must cultivate your own aesthetic and your own universe. Create your own universe and share it with people you respect and love.’

Above all Talley teaches us that, even in the most cutting edge contemporary spheres of work and life, the past sheds light on the present. 

As author Michael Crichton has observed:
'If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.'

John Lamparski - Getty Images

'My mama told me, she said, "Son, please beware
There's this thing called love, and it's everywhere."
And she told me it can break your heart
And put you in misery. 
Since I met this little woman I feel it's happened to me,
And I'm tellin' you
It's too late to turn back now.
I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love.
It's too late to turn back now
I believe, I believe, I believe I'm falling in love.’

The Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose, 'Too Late to Turn Back Now’ (E Cornileus)

No. 365

‘My Nails Are Longer Than My Future’: ‘Our Generation’ and the Power of Verbatim Reporting

'They make you remember so much things. And it’s just like a waste of brain space. Yeah, like my brain’s only thirty-two GB.’

I recently watched ‘Our Generation,’ a fine play articulating the perspectives of contemporary teenagers. (The National Theatre, London, until 9 April, and then the Chichester Festival Theatre, 22 April to 14 May.)

‘If I-I don’t get my top grades I’m just gonna go into policing. I feel like I’m good at investigating like when something goes on at home. I’m very good at solving the crime.’

Over a five-year period Alecky Blythe and her team of ‘collectors’ interviewed twelve young people in London, Birmingham, Northamptonshire, Anglesey, Glasgow and Belfast. She then edited these testimonies into a tapestry of the concerns, obsessions, fears and fantasies of a generation. The teenagers are played by talented actors who retain the hesitations, repetitions and deviations of the source material.

‘I switched, um, friends groups. Er, I’m hanging more round with Sienna, cos like, Sienna’s a quiet girl and she hangs around with, like, people like Amy and Charity and they’re, like, quiet people. And then, yeah cos of that, I think that if I continue hanging around with her then I will get myself into less trouble.’

The young people come across as at once charming and frustrating. They oscillate wildly from one subject to another. Sometimes they are uncannily wise and sometimes extraordinarily foolish. They worry about exams and fitting in and relationships. They dream of wealth, celebrity, America and Primark. 

'Celebrities are a big part of my life because I’ve always wanted to become one.’

‘I’ve gotta be at a hundred per cent health so I can watch Love Island.’

‘I’m not falling in love because one, I’m not allowed; two, I can’t be bothered with it; three, it never works out.’

Their worldview is naturally narrow and self-centred. And they have a tendency to catastrophize.

‘Be obsessed with yourself because you never meet anyone like yourself.’

‘I’ve stopped going out, I’ve got no friends, I’ve got no life.’

Occasionally they reveal heart-rending vulnerability. 

‘So, mm, as I got older I started realising that, you know, um, I’m not really, like, I don’t know I just feel like… I’m not pretty.’

To some extent these concerns are timeless. I recognise many of them from my own distant youth - with a pang of melancholy. But then there are also themes that are particular to the modern world.

‘I love my phone. So much. It’s my life. I’m not even lying. It’s got my whole life in it.’

‘I just need to take a picture, like, yeah? That’s my mentality, take a picture. Instagram’s gotta have a picture.’

‘I got nine’een likes on that, eighty-two on that, hundred and twenty on that, a hundred and three on that, a hundred and twenty-two on that.’

‘Maybe it’s FOMO culture; we’re constantly seeing what everyone else is doing so we wanna be involved, so we never get a break.’

‘Our Generation’ is an excellent example of what’s termed verbatim theatre. It documents the spoken words of real people, and as such it has a very particular, authentic resonance.

I have always been struck by the way verbatim text sounds so different to what we are accustomed to hearing on stage and screen. Here we are confronted with the pauses, stutters, malapropisms and grammatical errors of everyday speech. It’s raw, genuine, true.

‘I’m not accepting this. This isn’t, this isn’t, this isn’t my result. I can do much more better than this… I don’t want to be in this class any more. I made the choice. I don’t wanna be in this class.’

I began my career as a Qualitative Market Researcher. I’d go up and down the country talking to consumers about beer and boilers and baked beans. When we presented our findings, I tried to impress my Clients with my insight, analysis and eloquence. One day I realised that the Clients were not that interested in my intellect. They were, however, fascinated by the occasional direct quotes that I inserted into the debrief. Suddenly they looked up and leaned in. These verbatim statements put the consumer in the room - unfiltered, unmediated, unvarnished. When subsequently we were able to video respondents, the effect was enhanced still further.

‘I don’t like to think about my future, like ever. I literally haven’t thought about what I’m gonna eat for dinner.’

I had to come to terms with the fact that real people articulating their opinions in their own voice are more compelling than my interpretation of what real people say. Perhaps we should all endeavour, not just to report what consumers are doing and thinking – but to bring their perspectives into the room with us.

‘That wasn’t me, that was someone else.’

I left ‘Our Generation’ with a greater understanding of, and sympathy for, a much younger generation. It’s tough out there. I also emerged with a commitment to introduce a little youthful levity into the too earnest world of Middle-to-Old Age.

‘I don’t want to be like serious adult then have serious children and have serious future in a serious house and serious everything.’

‘It's a rap race, with a fast pace.
Concrete words, abstract words,
Crazy words and lying words.
Hazy words and dying words,
Words of faith, tell me straight.
Rare words and swear words,
Good words and bad words.
What are words worth?
What are words worth? Words.’

Tom Tom Club, ‘Wordy Rappinghood’ (C Frantz Christopher / S Stanley) 

No. 364

The Odd Couple: What Warhol and Basquiat Teach Us About Collaboration

Andy: We’re very different…You’re all spontaneous and wild and so deep and mystical… and I’m still a commercial illustrator really, a photographer, obsessed with the surface of things.

I recently enjoyed ‘The Collaboration’, a play by Anthony McCarten that explores the period in the mid-1980s when artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked together.

We open in a New York gallery. Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger is expressing to Warhol his concern that the output of the celebrated master of Pop Art is becoming rather familiar.

Bruno: I mean all the brand names, the icons, reinterpreting things we see or use everyday. Everything silkscreened. As great as they are, they’re expected from you now. Forgive me, but when was the last time you picked up a brush and actually painted?

The ageing Warhol has not been focusing on his work. Rather he has been hanging out at Studio 54, partying with aristocrats, models, actors and rock stars. Bischofberger proposes a collaboration with hot young talent, Basquiat.

Bruno: It might be good for you, Andy. You can learn a lot from the young.

In the next scene Bischofberger puts the idea of a collaboration to a sceptical Basquiat.

Bruno: This could be incredible for you, Jean. Your name linked, as equals, with the most famous living painter in the world.

Jean: Is he living?

At length Warhol and Basquiat are persuaded. They begin work together, hesitantly at first. 

Warhol is cool, cautious and considered. Basquiat is daring, instinctive, fluid. Warhol sets up his tracing projector machine and sketches the outline of the General Electric logo. Basquiat adds bold blocks of colour, enigmatic scrawls and a smiling figure with its arms in the air. 

As they apply themselves to the task, they discuss their differing views of art. 

Warhol explains his fascination with commerce.

Andy: One of the things I hope history will remember me for, if there’s any justice, is that I’ve broken down the walls between business and art. Business is art, it’s the best art. And art has always been business. It’s all commerce now.

Warhol also rebuts the criticism that his work lacks passion.

Andy: I am commentating. In a neutral way. No one ever gets this, but I’m trying to make art that forces you to ignore it…the same way we’re ignoring life.

Basquiat, by contrast, believes that the best art has mystical properties.

Jean: Paintings can have supernatural power if you imbue them with them. These symbols, these images. Wherever they come from, they have a power. They’re like… incantations.

He suggests that art should have meaning and purpose.

Jean: Art should disturb the comfortable…comfort the disturbed.

Inevitably, with such contrasting opinions on their craft, there are occasional flashpoints.

Andy: I make beautiful things. Carefully. Very carefully. I produce out of what I see.

Jean: ‘Produce’? You re-produce.

Nonetheless the Odd Couple work well together. Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, they gain energy and inspiration from each other. They revel in the exchange of ideas and approaches. They enjoy the challenge. 

Eventually Warhol picks up his brush again and paints.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (General Electric II)
acrylic, oil pastel and silkscreen ink on canvas

Looking back on this collaboration that took place nearly 40 years ago, one can’t help but be struck by the chasm in age, career stage, style and perspective. Warhol was world famous, but stuck in a rut. Basquiat was in the ascendant, but with a lot to learn. Warhol was concerned with brands, media and fame; with surface and repetition. His work was aloof and distant. Basquiat’s art was populated by skeletons and skulls, masks and symbols. It was vibrant, dreamlike and magical.

Jean: Don’t you need a new challenge? You can’t just screenprint your life away.

Perhaps in the world of commercial creativity we should spend more time plotting irregular collaborations. Successful team alchemy is not just a matter of putting together like-minded soul mates. It is achieved by combining diverse skillsets, temperaments and outlooks; by creating the conditions for provocation and exchange, discovery and inspiration.

By the end of the play Warhol and Basquiat have produced enough paintings together to fill the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Bischofberger is satisfied. It’s time to move on.

Andy: I think we’re done. Don’t you? Let’s just say we are. That’s the great thing about contemporary art – who can fucken tell?

'We came the long way,
And I thought you knew,
It was the long way.
My darling, I thought you knew.
We came the long way.
So don't break my heart. 

We been through the desert
Where no water flows.
We've walked streets and highways
Where kung fu is afraid to go.
It was the long way.’

Junior Byles, ‘It Was a Long Way’ (W Boswell / J Byles)

No. 363

Creating Team Flow: An Act of Insubordination at the Annual Cross-Country Run

Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race), 1922. Pablo Picasso

‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’
(African) Proverb

Every year my school marked the anniversary of the martyrdom of its patron saint, Edmund Campion, with a cross-country run. Campion, who was executed by Queen Elizabeth I’s regime in 1581, was reputed to hold the record for being stretched the longest distance on the rack. Requiring the whole school to participate in the torture of a cross-country run seemed entirely appropriate.

We assembled in our purple-striped singlets on Bedfords Park, jogging about a bit on the spot to keep warm. The teachers were stationed at intervals along the course, probably as pleased to be there as we were.

'Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.’
Helen Keller

Eventually we set off in staggered year groups, through the mud and rain and wind and cold; up hills, into woods and across ditches. Soon the genuine athletes were far off in front - the Englishes, Farleys and Berrets - lean and agile, keen and competitive. The rest of us trooped along behind - shivering, moaning, staggering, panting. This was going to be a long, hard slog.

There was a section of the course that formed a large U-shape round a number of sports pitches. Suddenly, without any prior consultation, the mass of runners broke from the marked track and stormed across the pitches, thereby trimming a significant distance from the race. 

It was a wonder to behold. An unruly mob of exuberant teenage rebels, yelling and laughing as one. A cocktail of instinct, communality and dissent. 

Green-suited history master Bill Caswell waved his arms about and remonstrated with the throng. But to no avail. They just swarmed past him.

'Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success.’
Henry Ford

I read recently (The Times, 5 October, 2021) about a study into the phenomenon of ‘team flow’ conducted at Toyohashi University of Technology and California Institute of Technology.

It has already been established that there is a mental state of ‘flow,’ or being ‘in the zone’, when an individual becomes fully immersed in a task, enjoying the challenge. This new research considered whether a similar phenomenon occurs in groups. The scientists fitted a sample of adults aged between 18 and 35 with scalp sensors to measure their neural activity. They then divided them into teams and asked them to compete in a musical video game called O2Jam U, where players tap notes and blocks as they move down a street to the rhythm of a track.

'In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.’
Charles Darwin

The study found that, in the course of the exercise, participants’ brain waves harmonized with those of their teammates. They fell into a collective flow state whereby their brains could process information together. The researchers concluded that high functioning teams had ‘higher integration and neural synchrony between their brains.’

You could argue that this research merely establishes scientific proof of what we already know: that team skills are critical to success in sport, the arts and business.

Nonetheless I was struck by the thought that winning teams are not so much derived from rigid roles and formal relationships. They are not about hierarchies and command structures. Rather they are free spirited, instinctive and trusting. Founded on ‘neural synchrony,’ they communicate intuitively and decide spontaneously. Successful teams are fluid.

‘When you're getting down,
No sense in messing around.
Hold up, hold up.
If you want success,
Then do the thing that's best.
Hold up, hold up.
Talking 'bout do it, fluid.
Talking 'bout do it, fluid.’
The Blackbyrds, ‘Do It, Fluid’ (D Byrd)

No. 362

‘Look at This - Look at That’: Ruth Orkin’s Street Photography and the Art of Multi-Tasking

Geraldine Dent, New York City, 1949. Photograph: Ruth Orkin

'My mother said that when I was young I was constantly saying, ‘Look at this - Look at that.’ I think that taking pictures must be my way of asking people to ‘Look at this - Look at that.’ If my photographs make the viewer feel what I did when I first took them - ‘Isn’t this funny... terrible... moving... beautiful?’ - then I’ve accomplished my purpose.'
Ruth Orkin

Last year was the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of American street photographer and filmmaker Ruth Orkin.

Orkin was a pioneer. A photographer who recorded ordinary people at work and play, who celebrated the complex rhythms of city life, who recognised the poetry of the everyday.  A hard working, resourceful woman, determined to make a mark in a business dominated by men.

‘Maybe because my primary interest was in movies, I wanted to tell stories with pictures, even if they didn’t move.’

Orkin was born in Boston and raised in Hollywood, the only child of a silent-film actress and a manufacturer of toy boats. Aged 10 she was given her first camera, a 39-cent Univex.

Comic Book Readers, West Village, NYC, 1947, Ruth Orkin

In her unpublished autobiography, written in 1984, Orkin described how she taught herself to use her camera by referring to a short 25-cent book ‘Photography for Fun’ by William M Strong. 

‘In Strong’s chapter on How To Learn Photography there were just six items: 

1. Look at good pictures. > I did that automatically because they attracted me.
2. Read the photographic mags. > I did.
3. Look at the camera club in your city. > There wasn’t any in Eagle Rock.
4. Get some more books on photography. > I looked at everything I could at the Los Angeles public library.
5. Look up photographic courses. > I wouldn’t have had the money. I gave my own course in photographic chemistry in chemistry class.
6. Take a lot of pictures. > I did.’

Orkin clearly had remarkable application. When she was 17 she embarked on an epic bike trip across America, from Los Angeles to the 1939 World's Fair in New York, taking pictures along the way. After briefly studying photojournalism at Los Angeles City College, she became a messenger girl at MGM Studios and during World War II she served with the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps. 

In 1943 Orkin moved to New York. By night she took pictures in the city’s clubs, and by day she shot baby photos. She saved enough money to buy her first professional camera, and eventually, in 1945, her first picture was published in the Macy’s employee magazine: an image of V-E Day celebrations on Times Square. 

In time Orkin found freelance work at most of the major magazines: Life, Look, Ladies' Home Journal, and many others. Viewed together her images provide a portrait of New York street life in the 1940s and early ‘50s.

Women on the Street, NYC, Ruth Orkin

A suited man walks along West 88th Street with only a trilby to shelter him from the rain. Middle-aged women in smart hats jostle to find a bargain at the Department Store. Tired travellers sit on their suitcases at Penn Station. Courting couples cuddle up close on Coney Island. 

There are people milling around the barbershops, cinemas and soda stands, at busy street corners, past neon signs and insistent advertising hoardings. You can buy watermelons, malted milk, ‘red hot frankfurters and ice cold drinks.’

The kids in the West Village are engrossed in their comic books. Teenage girls recline on top of a Ford Shipping Container at Gansevoort Pier, and a brave boy jumps into the Hudson in his trunks. With extravagant gestures and animated expressions, young Jimmy tells his friends a story. 

In 1950 Orkin won a competition set by the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal to find an image that reflected the more liberated post-war American woman.

‘I had not only just photographed a beautiful girl who was not a model, but she was doing something that all his female readers could identify with.’ 

New York housewife Geraldine Dent stands outside a greengrocer with a bursting bag of fruit in one arm. She seems animated, caught in conversation. There’s a pleasing echo of red, from her stylish beret, to her lipstick and scarf, to the half eaten-strawberry she clasps in her hand. It was the first time a 35mm colour slide had been used on the front of such a magazine and the issue sold out its 4 million print run.

‘In order to make a living as a photographer I had to make contacts, get jobs, and try to sell pictures. Some days I felt that I was forever going up and down elevators, riding subways or buses, walking on sidewalks, and waiting in offices.’

Orkin had to be determined to succeed in a male-dominated profession. There was a significant gender pay gap (‘You don’t have a family to support.’) and permanent staff reporter roles were reserved for men. 

In time Orkin learned to cherish the independence of a freelancer: her freedom from editorial control; her license to follow her own instincts and judgement to find the best stories.

‘It gives you all kinds of excuses to be where you’re not supposed to be.’

Orkin clearly thought deeply about her craft. She recognised that, as in all creative professions, her success or failure resided in the choices she made.

Three Boys on Suitcases, Penn Station, Ruth Orkin

‘It means MAKING DECISIONS
Deciding when to push the shutter
Deciding whether to sacrifice speed for depth of focus or vice versa
Deciding whether to keep my presence secret and get a picture that would not be as good as if I allowed my presence to be known
Deciding which BW proofs to blow up
Deciding how to lay out a caption and a picture story
Deciding which magazine to show it to first’

As a freelancer Orkin also needed to be a master of multi-tasking.

‘To be a photographer you had to know how to splice wires, clean a battery
Contact, load your own film (to save money)
Develop and print… Spot (darkroom technician)
Keep a record of all business expenses (accountant)
Type letters and bills (secretary)
Research pic stories in recent magazines (research)
Make dates with editors and show or discuss ideals (salesperson)
File clerk: file negs and prints
Keep files folder on each customer: mags publ, book publ, miscel (secretary)
Selling ideas
How to gate crash – or get into places you weren’t supposed to be.
Gallery chores’

Ruth Orkin

In the early 1950s Orkin was given assignments in Israel and Italy. She was also commissioned to take celebrity portraits: Leonard Bernstein and Lucille Ball, Tennessee Williams and Montgomery Clift; Einstein, Hitchcock, Brando and Bacall. In 1952 she married photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel and they collaborated on two independent films, the first of which ‘Little Fugitive’ was Oscar nominated.

Orkin returned to photography. Ever resourceful, she dealt with the constraints of caring for two small children by taking shots from her apartment window. This led to the publication of two ‘Through My Window’ books. 

'To be a photojournalist takes experience, skill, endurance, energy, salesmanship, organization, wheedling, climbing, gatecrashing, etc. – plus an eye and patience.’

In 1985 Ruth Orkin died of cancer at her New York apartment. She left behind a record of the American city experience in the mid 20th century. She told stories in pictures - stories that communicated a love of life, of ordinary people and the theatre of the street. She made us ‘Look at this - Look at that.’ And she taught us that success in any creative profession requires more than just talent.

'I always felt that being a photographer was 90 percent being a salesperson. Then and today.'

[You can see a record of Ruth Orkin’s work in the excellent book ‘Ruth Orkin:  A Photo Spirit’]

'I play the street life
Because there's no place I can go.
Street life,
It's the only life I know.
Street life,
And there's a thousand cards to play.
Street life,
Until you play your life away.
You never let people see
Just who you wanna be.
And every night you shine
Just like a superstar.
The type of life that's played
Attempts at masquerade.
You dress, you walk, you talk,
You're who you think you are.’

Randy Crawford, ’Street Life’ (W Jennings / J Sample)

No. 361