[JPL] Jeff Turton - Coldblood/Lydia

[Jazz Promo Services]

Since we¹re venturing back to the 1960s here¹s an interesting new photo
exhibit form someone who was there...


<http://www.easthamptonstar.com/dnn/Home20061130/Arts/Counterculture/tabid/7
12/Default.aspx>  

Capturing The Counterculture

Photos by Fred McDarrah at the Steven Kasher Gallery

By Jennifer Farbar

(11/30/2006)    The photographer Fred W. McDarrah¹s latest show, ³Artists
and Writers of the ¹60s and ¹70s,² is a collection of over 100 vintage
images, some only recently discovered or published, representing what
amounts to a thick, satisfying slice of both this longtime Village Voice
photographer¹s work and the cultural moment he captured with it.


    The exhibit of Mr. McDarrah¹s work, at the Steven Kasher Gallery in
Manhattan, was timed to coincide with his 80th birthday. Mr. McDarrah and
his wife, Gloria, have been living at least part time at their house off
Three Mile Harbor Road in East Hampton for over 30 years ‹ but it is through
the photographer¹s 40-odd years of association, both as a photojournalist
and photo editor, with the formerly countercultural weekly newspaper that he
is probably best known.

    He got his start at The Village Voice selling ads, and it was some time
before he sold the first of what would be hundreds of photographs,
beginning, most memorably, with the Beat generation poets and writers of the
1950s and the New York School of painters, also in the 1950s.

    For the most part, it seems that Mr. McDarrah, like some of the best
photojournalists, got good shots simply by being there ‹ in his case, at the
seminal moment when the art, literary, and cultural scenes in New York
converged, giving birth to happenings and be-ins, demonstrations and
improvisation. Politics and folk music and the nascent Beat movement define
a large portion of the work on display in this exhibit. (Mr. McDarrah has
also collaborated with his wife and sons, Timothy and Patrick McDarrah, on a
number of books.)

    Most of the prints in this exhibit, which could more broadly be said to
include not just the artists and writers of those years but also the images
of the whole of the cultural zeitgeist of what has been described as this
country¹s one existential moment, are portrait-like in their focus on one
subject.

    The show opens with a shot of Jack Kerouac and some women. The occasion
is a 1958 New 
Fred McDarrah
Bob Dylan, Sheridan Square Park, Greenwich Village, Jan. 22, 1965
     

Year¹s Eve celebration at the Artists Club, and the spirit of the evening is
very much present in the seeming casualness of the shot ‹ it would not be
disrespectful of Mr. McDarrah to call it a particularly good party picture
such as one might take at a party of one¹s friends, the sort of ³Oh look,
there¹s Jack, where¹s the camera?² moment familiar to even the most amateur
shutterbug. The focus, as with several other photographs in the show, is on
Kerouac, but the women surrounding him tell a story, too, in their positions
and gestures.

    Another shot captures Kerouac, clad in a peacoat, onstage during a
reading, his hand aloft in a descriptive gesture, the whole combining to
create an effect not unlike looking through a stereopticon at a complete,
three-dimensional scene of, say, ice-skating at the turn of the century. The
motion and the detail put you there, your imagination is set free to become
part of the scene itself.

    Mr. McDarrah has said he began taking photographs after he purchased a
little camera at the 1939 New York World¹s Fair, documenting the street
scenes of his Brooklyn neighborhood, his mother, and his brother. He seems
to have brought the same openness to the subjects depicted here. They are
not posing so much as captured ‹ mid-thought, mid-gesture, mid-brushstroke.

    There are a series of photographs of New York School artists in their
studios ‹ de Kooning, Alice Neel, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, James
Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, even Christo and Jean Claude, in their Crosby Street
loft, looking young and smiling.

    Mr. McDarrah, who said in a 1999 interview with The East Hampton Star
that ³If somebody called me a fine arts photographer I¹d laugh them out of
the room,² is indeed a photojournalist, in the best and strictest sense of
the term. His images capture their subjects, usually head-on and often from
the waist up ‹ the focus is on the face, the gesture, the moment, and less
on what photography professors might call composition and vanishing point.
Your eye goes to what Mr. McDarrah¹s eye went to all those decades ago: This
person doing this, at this place and at this time.

    A shot of Phil Ochs, guitar slung across his chest, standing on
MacDougal Street, captures almost as an afterthought the MacDougal Street of
the late 1950s and early 1960s, when coffeehouses and clubs dotted the
crooked lanes of Greenwich Village and starving artists were actually
starving, living in village garrets, before the whole operation picked up
and headed east to SoHo and then the East Village.

    The political climate of the times, at least on the East Coast, is
represented by shots like the one of Susan Sontag being arrested in front of
the Whitehall Street Induction Center during a demonstration there; Allen
Ginsberg, wearing a sequined Uncle Sam hat, at a Fifth Avenue peace
demonstration to end the war in Vietnam, and by photographs of some of the
various happenings and performances that were themselves forms of protest,
against conformity, repression, war.

    Andy Warhol appears in a number of guises: at Factory parties, posing in
front of his Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964, across a desk from
a very young future California governor named Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    And what show documenting the Œ60s and Œ70s could help but have some of
its musical icons represented? There are Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, John
Cage, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, and Mick Jagger ‹ a
music-world microcosm of the country¹s journey from innocence to informed
outrage, from experimentation to overdose; from apple pie to Altamont, the
assassinations of the early to mid-1960s drawing like a dark curtain on the
improvisational beat of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, snuffing out
the bright, tie-dyed hope of the Age of Aquarius.

    One of Mr. McDarrah¹s best-known images, a close-up of Bob Dylan, was
shot in Sheridan Square Park in 1965 for a music review in The Voice. In it,
Dylan, vaguely scowling, wearing a black turtleneck, salutes for the camera,
poking fun at the moment, his mock-seriousness capturing in a gesture the
strident anger, earnest hope, and hipster ambivalence of a post-nuclear
America.
    The show will be on display at the Steven Kasher Gallery at 521 West
23rd Street through Jan. 6.