Original subtitles

It's.

Is it all right?

It's all right.

These are recollections of a dozen still photographs I made several years ago.

Does it sound alright?

Yes, yes, perfect.

It's fine.

This is the first photograph ever made with the direct intention of making art.

I had bought myself a camera for Christmas in 1958.

One day, early in January of 1959, I photographed several drawings by Carl Andrade, with whom I shared a cheap apartment on Mulberry Street.

One frame of thumb flat over to Carl that he said, or rather squat for a portrait.

He insisted that the photograph must incorporate a handsome small picture frame that had been given him a year or so before by a girl named North.

How the metronome entered the scheme I don't recall, but it must have been deliberately.

The picture frame reappears in a photograph dated March 1963, but there isn't time to show you that one now.

I discovered the metronome eventually after tolerating its intubation for quite a while.

Carl Andre is 12 years older and more active than he was then.

I see less of him nowadays than I should like.

But then there are other people of whom I see more than I care to.

I despised this photograph for several years, but I could never bring myself to destroy a negative so incriminating.

It's.

I made this photograph on March 11, 1959.

The face is my own, or rather, it was my own.

As you see, I was thoroughly pleased with myself at the time, presumably for having survived to such brightness and wisdom.

Since it was my 23rd birthday, I focused the camera, sat on a stool in front of it and made the exposures by squeezing a rubber ball with my right foot.

There are 11 more photographs on the roll of film, all of comparable grandeur.

Some of them exhibit my feature in more sensitive or imposing moods.

One exposure records what now looks to me like a leader.

I sent that one to a very pretty and sensible girl on the occasion with Reynolds Equinox, a holiday I held in some esteem.

I think I wrote her some sort of cryptic note on the back, but I never heard from her again.

Anyhow, photography had obviously caught my fancy.

This photograph was made in the studio where I worked.

It belonged to the wife of a friend.

I dare say they are still married, but he has not been my friend for nearly 10 years.

We became estranged on account of an obscure mutual embarrassment that involved a third party and three dozen eggs.

I take some comfort in realizing that my entire physical body has been replaced more than once since it made this portrait of its However, I understand that my central nervous system is an exception.

This photograph was made in September of 1960.

The window is that of a dusty cabinet maker's shop on the west side of West Broadway, somewhere between Spring street and West Houston.

I first photographed it more than a year earlier as part of a series, but rejected it for reasons having to do with its tastefulness and illusion of deep space.

Then, in the course of two years, I made a half dozen more negatives.

Each time I found something made me feel dissatisfied.

The negative was too flat or too harsh or the framing was too tight.

Once a horse was reflected in the glass, although I don't recall seeing that horse once I found myself reflected with my camera and tripod.

Finally, the cabinet maker closed up shop and moved away.

I can't even remember exactly where he was anymore.

But a year after that, I happened to compare the prints I made from the six negatives.

I was astonished.

In the midst of my concern for the flaws of my method, the window itself had changed from season to season far more than my photographs had.

I had thought my subject changeless and my own sensibility pliable.

But I was wrong about that.

So I chose the one photograph that pleased me most after all and destroyed the rest.

That was years ago now.

I'm sorry.

I only wish you significant.

It's in 1961.

For six or eight months I lived in a boardroom loft on Bond street near the Bowery.

A young painter who lived on the floor above me wanted to be an old master.

He talked a great deal about gums and varnishes.

He was on his way to Impasto's of Reverend Thickness.

The spring of that year was sunny, and I spent a month photographing junk and rubble in imitation of action painting.

My neighbor saw my new work, and he was not especially pleased.

His opinion upset me, and for good reason.

He lived with a woman, I believe her father was a Brazilian economist who seemed to stay with him out of inertia.

She was monumentally fair, succulent and indifferent in the warm weather.

She went about nearly naked, and I would invent excuses to visit upstairs in order to stare at her.

My photographs failing as an excuse, I decided to ingratiate myself in the household by making a realistic work of art.

I carved the numerals you see by the model in clay and then cast them in plaster.

The piece is called a cast of thousands.

The numbers are reversed in the cast, of course, but I reverse them again in printing to enhance their intelligibility.

Anyway, I finally unveiled the piece one Evening.

I suppose the hand was properly horrified.

But the girl, who had never said a dozen words to me, laughed and then laughed outrageously and then outrageously kissed me.

It's.

Early in 1963, Frank Stella asked me to name a portrait.

He needed it for some casual business use.

A show announcement or maybe a passport, something like that.

I only recall that it needed to be done quickly.

A witness would do.

I made a dozen witnesses and he chose one.

His dealer paid for the job.

Most of these dozen faces seem resigned or melancholy.

This one amuses me because Frank looks so entirely self possessed.

I suppose blowing smoke rings admits a little feeling beyond that.

Looking at the photograph recently, it reminded me unaccountably of a photograph of another artist squirting water out of his mouth, which is undoubtedly art.

Blowing smoke rings seems more of a craft.

Ordinarily, only aqua singers make art with their mouths.

It's.

It's.

I made this photograph of James Rosenquist the first day we met.

That was on Palm Sunday in 1963, when he lived in a red rig building at number five County Slip.

I went there to photograph him in a studio for a fashion magazine.

The job was a washout, but Rosenquist and I remained friends for years afterward.

He rented two floors in the building.

The lower floor, where he lived with his wife, Mary Lou, was cool, neat and pleasant.

Mary Lou was relaxed, cool, neat, very tall and extremely pleasant.

Rosenquist was calm.

It was a lovely, soft, quiet Sunday.

We talked for a while and then went upstairs to his work room.

I made 96 negatives in about two hours.

This was the last.

It is unrelated to the others.

Rosenquist is holding open a copy of an old magazine.

A map of the United States shows the distribution of our typical song words.

I admire this photograph for its internal geometry.

The expression of its subject is virtually perfect mapping of tonal values on the grayscale.

It pleases me as much as anything I did.

James Rosenquist and I live far apart now and we seldom meet.

But I cannot recall one moment spent in his company that I didn't completely enjoy.

It's.

This photograph was made at about 3 o' clock on the morning of June 6, 1963, in Lower Manhattan.

It may even have been Wall Street.

It is seen from the sidewalk through the window of a large bank that's being closed for renovation, partially demolished.

Inside, a big crystal chandelier is draped in a dusty translucent membrane that recalls the tents of caterpillars.

Someone has written with a forefinger on the dusty pane the words I like my new name.

This seemed mysterious to me at that time.

I was much taken with the photographs of Lartee, and I wanted to make photographs as mysterious as his.

Without, however, attempting to comprehend his wit.

All I learned was that the two were somehow bound together anyway.

My eye for mystery is defective, and so this may be the only example I'll ever produce.

Nevertheless, because it is very difficult later to print, I find that I do so with less and less volume.

This photograph of two toilets was made in February of 1964 with a new view camera I just got at that time.

As you can see, it is an imitation of the painted Renaissance crucifixion.

The outline on the cross is quite clear at its foot.

The closed bowl on the right represents the Blessed Virgin.

On the left is St.

Mary Magdalene.

A bowl with its lid raised.

The roll of toilet paper stands for the skull of Adam, whose sin is conventionally washed away by the blood of the crucified Savior Sheds.

The stairs leading up to the two booths symbolize calico.

I'm not completely certain of the iconographic significance of the light bulbs, but the halos that surround them are more than suggested.

Late in the fall of 1964, a painter friend asked me to make a photographic document of spaghetti, an image that he wanted to incorporate into work of his own.

I set up my camera above an empty dark room tray, opened a number two can of Franklin American spaghetti, and poured it out.

Then I straighted around until I saw a suitably random arrangement of pastel strands and finished the photograph in a short order.

Then, instead of disposing of the spaghetti, I left it there and made one photograph every day.

This was the 18th such photograph.

The spaghetti has dried without rotting.

The sauce is a kind of pink varnish on the yellow strings.

The entirety is covered in attractive material colonies and mould in three black, green, and white.

I continued the series until no further change appeared to be taking place, about two months altogether.

The spaghetti was never entirely consumed, but the mould eventually disappeared.

This photograph was made at Michael Snow's studio sometime in 1965.

It was made into a poster announcing a show of squawking women works at the Poindexter Gallery in that year.

As many as possible pieces are seen by reflection or transmission in a transparent sheet of acrylic plastic, which is itself part of a piece.

The result is probably confusing, but no more so than the show apparently was, since it seems to have been studiously ignored.

If you look closely, you can see Michael Snow himself on the left by transmission, and my camera on the right.

By reflection I recall that we worked half a day for two or three exposures.

I believe that Snow was pleased with the photograph itself, as I was, though he disliked the poster intensity.

He said I had chosen a typeface that looked like an invitation to a church of social.

I regret to say that he was right, but it was too late.

There was nothing to do about it.

The whole business still troubles me.

I wish I could apologize to him.

It.

This closed photograph of Larry Woons reclining on his bed was made early in 1966.

Revolve magazine I was ecstatically happy that afternoon.

For entirely personal reasons.

I set up my camera quickly, made a single exposure, and left.

Later on I was sent a check for the photograph that I got in a fanatic book by half.

I returned it to the magazine with a letter of explanation.

They sent me another check for the amount I asked for.

So did my dollars.

Months later the photograph was published.

I was working in a color film laboratory at the time.

My boss saw the photograph and I nearly lost my job.

I decided to stop doing this sort of thing.

Sam.

I did not make this photograph, nor do I know who did, nor can I recall precisely when it was made.

It was printed in a newspaper, so I suppose that any patient person with an interest in this sort of thing could satisfy himself entirely as to his origins.

The image is slightly indistinct.

A stubby middle aged man wearing a baseball cap looks back in matter of fact dismay or disgruntled of the camera.

It is caught in the midst of a display of spears, each about the size of a grapefruit and of some nondescript white color.

He holds four of them in his cupped hands.

The rest seem half submerged in water, or else lying in something like mud.

A vague marginal mass behind the crouching man suggests foliage.

I am as puzzled and mildly distressed by the sight of this photograph as its protagonist seems to be with the spheres.

They seem absolutely alien and yet not very forbidding.

After all, what does it mean?

I am uncertain, but perfectly willing to offer a plausible explanation.

The man is a Texas fruit grower.

His orchards lie near the Gulf of Mexico.

The spheres are grapefruit.

As they neared maturity, a hurricane flooded the orchard and knocked down the fruit.

The man is stunned by his commercial loss and a little resentful of the photographer who intrudes upon his attempt to assess it.

On the other hand, were photography of greater antiquity, then this image might date from the time of, let us say, Pascal, and I suppose he would have understood it quite differently, Since 1966.

I have made few photographs.

This has been partly through design and partly through laziness.

I think I expose fewer than 50 negatives a year.

Now, of course, I work more deliberately than I once did, and that counts for something.

But I must confess that I've largely given up still photography.

So it is all the more surprising that I felt again a few weeks ago a vagrant urge that would seem familiar a few years ago.

The urge to take my camera out of doors and make a photograph.

It was a quite simple, obtrusive need, so I evaded.

I wandered around for hours, unsatisfied, and finally turned towards home.

In the afternoon, half a block from my front door, the receding perspective of an alley caught my eye.

A dark tunnel with a cross street beyond, brightly lit.

As I focused and composed the image, a truck turned into the alley.

The driver stopped it got out and walked away.

He left his cab door open.

My composition was spoiled, but I felt a perverse impulse to make the exposure anyway.

I did so and then went home to develop my single negative.

When I came to print the negative, an odd thing struck my eye.

Something standing in the cross street and invisible to me, was reflected in the factory window and then reflected once more in the rear view mirror attached to the truck door.

It was only a tiny detail.

Since then, I have enlarged this small section of my negative enormously.

The grain of the film all but obliterates the features of the image.

It is obscured by any possible reckoning.

It is hopelessly ambiguous.

Nevertheless, what I believe I see in court, in that speck of film, fills me with such fear, such uttered dread and loathing, that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph.

Here it is.

Look at it.

Do you see what I see?