Photography, Photographers, and Artists-with-Cameras

I met Cindy Sherman once, an artist who uses a camera to record herself dressed up as fictional characters ripe with feminist undertones. Beginning in the late 1970s, projects like her "Untitled Film Stills" threw both the art world and the photography world into a tizzy– mouthpieces for both worlds either loved her or hated her.

We met one night at Rhode Island School of Design, the great art school in Providence with a legendary photography program established by Harry Callahan in 1961. RISD was where I always believed I would have thrived if only a college like that had been in the cards for me. It wasn’t, to my deep regret, and I had to teach myself my chosen craft. Just like Harry Callahan did, come to think of it, and things seemed to have worked out pretty well for him.

Anyway, it was 1985, and I was living in a cheap two-room apartment in what had once been a somewhat notorious whorehouse on the wrong end of the city’s storied East Side. I took the place because, at $375 a month, it was just barely within my means while also being just barely within walking distance of the school. It was a very long walk to be sure, both literally and metaphorically, but after enrolling in an evening design class there, it was a walk I was eager to take. Even though the sole qualification for admission to the class was a check that didn’t bounce, for a short time I finally became part of a vibrant artistic community.

Sherman came to the school that year as part of a public lecture series featuring many of the art world’s most noteworthy movers and shakers. I didn’t like her work at all, or, more accurately, I didn’t get it, and I had simply been too incurious to at least try to understand it. The photographers I admired were the ones who let their pictures do the talking, but here suddenly was someone with deceptively simple pictures that required an academic dissertation on misogyny and sexism to fully appreciate. But I figured I was there to learn, and what better way to learn about something I didn’t understand than to have it explained to me by the artist herself?

She turned out to be a real head scratcher– down to earth, nice, humble, even. She seemed to be almost wondrous at how, like me, she didn’t quite feel smart enough to understand how her work had become so important to so many. The difference is, she WAS smart enough, but I still wasn’t.

I’ve probably met more than my fair share of luminaries like Cindy Sherman over the years, and my takeaways seem to always come down to the same three observations: a few were transcendent beings, a few were pompous jackasses, but most are just regular folks who happened to possess extraordinary talent. Cindy Sherman may fall into the first category, but Harry Callahan, who I eventually met a few years before he died, definitely falls into the last.

This time it was in a more intimate setting at another school, Boston University’s Photographic Resource Center, sitting around a table with a handful of other photographers. Callahan sat in the chair next to me in a modest suit and tie clutching a yellow 8x10 Kodak photo paper box in his lap. We were all peppering the master with questions that he sometimes appeared to have trouble answering with sufficient eloquence. (Funny story: a guy I know was a student of Harry’s at RISD. When he was asked what it takes to be a successful photographer, Harry thought for a moment and said “find a rich girlfriend”.)

The discussion was fascinating, but all I really wanted to know was what was in the box. When I finally asked him “Harry, what’s in the box?”, he opened it and gingerly laid out, one by one, a series of very familiar black and white images, each a masterpiece of 20th century photography. It was such an ordinary presentation for such extraordinary work.

Later, we all walked over to an adjacent gallery space where an exhibit of Callahan’s recent work had just opened. They were frenetic, multiply-exposed cityscapes shot in color with a simple 35mm point and shoot camera, printed and framed sofa-size and arranged exquisitely on the walls around the room. Harry was seeing his pictures in this finished form for the very first time. Like Cindy Sherman’s work, they weren’t exactly my cup of tea, but, hey, they were by Harry-fucking-Callahan, the slight old gentleman and icon who was at that very moment standing right beside me. Who was I to even HAVE a cup of tea? Still holding his box of photographic history tightly, one of us asked him how he liked the show.

“Oh, very nice” was all he said.

I’ll finish here where I started, back in that auditorium at RISD in ’85 with Cindy Sherman. When her talk was over, a group of students gathered around her to chat briefly before leaving. I stood on the periphery, listening, still trying to learn.

Soon it was just the two of us standing there. I did my best to politely tell her that I really wasn’t sure how I felt about her work, but I was definitely moved by her talk. Perhaps sensing that I wasn’t exactly a doctoral candidate in art criticism, she suggested that if I wanted to learn more, I should call the gallery that represented her in New York, mention her name, and ask them to send me a catalog of one of her recent shows. I did, the very next day, and when I told the woman who answered the phone that I had just met Cindy Sherman, she said, warmly, “well, you are very lucky”.

I was 28 years old, and yes I was. But they had run out of catalogs.