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The smell of fixer is one of my oldest memories of photography and my dad’s Nikon SP and the black Besseler enlarger would eventually become part of my own path into photography. Robert Levin was a writer at heart, and didn’t flatter himself with comparisons to the pros of the day, who happened also to be his professional associates and friends, but took some pleasure in his creations. As an editor, he assigned Henri Cartier-Bresson to photograph Dr. Anthony Pisicano, a local Long Beach pediatrician, and the Frenchman visited or house. Weegee passed by the house once, and Life’s Bill Ray photographed our family for a Life Magazine. Bob’s photography books were among my earliest photographic influences, although the truth is that I came to photography in my 20’s, and that his friendship with Howard Chapnick of Black Star, who also lived in Long Beach, was a major door-opener for me.

When my father passed away in the early 70’s I was given two large boxes by his secretary at Redbook Magazine, containing thousands ofj prints, negatives and personal papers from his childhood in the Bronx, where he attended Dewitt Clinton High School amd eventually the City University of New York and then Columbia. Like many of the upwardly mobile Jewish families living in the Bronx, the Levins had begun a slow migration to Long Island. For Alfred and Frances Levin and their two boys, Long Beach was the preferred summertime residence. Alfred was a jewelry salesman, first travelling in the South and than opening up his own business in the Jewelry Exchange on 47th Street. America was both affluent and expanding, and young adults were mobile and interested in things like Kodak Brownie cameras, which were extremely popular and easy to use, and made photography available to the growing American middle class. The first section of pictures taken in Long Beach, of Bob and his friends were made with one of them.

Robert served in the military during World War II as a writer for Stars and Stripes, the army’s newspaper. But he returned to Europe after the war with my mother, Martha, and spent a year, writing and photographing extensively, this time with a black Rollei twin lens reflex camera. These photographs are among most interesting, moody still-lifes and landscapes, often inspired, or so she jokingly insisted, by the direction of my mother, who had studied art history, and considered herself to have the finer eye of the two. In fact, she took full credit for his ability with the camera.

After returning to New York, Robert freelanced as a writer for men’s magazines like Pageant and Coronet, writing detective stories and doing interviews with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy. The young couple lived in Long Beach in a rented apartment, and looked foward to a bright future in a country of expanding opportunity. I was born in New York City in 1950, and with my sister Peri followed two years later Before settling in and buying a house with a GI Loan, my parents decided to return to Europe, and the four of us we sailed off to France pn the Liberte. We lived in England, France, Spain and Italy, and my dad continued to freelance for the men’s magazines. typing off manuscripts and mailing them off to his editors in New York. By this time he had purchased a Nikon 35mm camera which had become the rage in photography and was aware of the work of Cartier-Bresson, as he was of the progressive writers like Jean-Paul Satre, and of course the American Henry Miller, and in our little family he had a opportunity to document what was a very idyllic and transformational time. He liked street photography, but some of the most compelling images are clearly of his own family. I don’t remember him posing any pictures, he was definitely a bit of a lurker. He rolled his own film, and developed much of it in a portable darkroom.

The family returned to Long Island so that I could begin school. We bought a Levitt house in Long Beach, and eventually Bob would take an editorial position in Manhattan at Redbook Magazine and commuted by train or car from Long Beach. The photographs from this time period are less candid and more representative of special events, a school play or graduation, or a family gathering. Eventually he was able to purchase a larger home in nearby Lido Beach very close to the water and it is here that the photographs tapered off. A divorce, a new life in Manhattan, made photography more of an afterthought, and less of a passion. There was less time, and certainly much less time for the family on Long Island.
What has become clear to me, is that the camera and the photographs of the family represented a vision of what family life was supposed to be, rather than the reality of what it was, or what perhaps what my father was.

My own career as a photography, if you could call it a career, has roots in the work of my father’s pictures. My comfort about the camera, came directly as a result of its presence as an indicator of love. I started with the Nikon SP that was used for all of his European work, although by this time the SLR had become the magazine photographer’s workhorse, and I quickly gravitated to the newer cameras, for better or worse, and the eventual assignments that took me all over the world and allowed me more success than I ever thought possible as a professional photographer.

But looking back at my father’s pictures, what impresses me most is that some of the most meaningful images that we can take are of things that are of our families, our friends, our communities, and the moments of our lives that are worth preserving. All photographs are proof that something happened and a way to mark our time as we live our days, one at a time. The increased volume of images, from cell-phone cameras, digital SLRS and the like as easy to use as they are, doesn’t really change the reason for using a camera. And I can only wonder what the children of today will see forty years from now when looking back
at the images taken by their parents. Will they be nostalgic for the 2010s? Probably so,

For most women, the current issue of 100Eyes will probably contain no surprises, but describes something that they already are familiar with, which is the complex and intimate that they relate to their bodies. For males, I think Linda Troeller’s work contains a heavy dose of reality, and maybe a realization that many of us are wired quite differently than females—and that although we are the same species we are quite different creatures. I am always cautious about talking in generalities about sex, because as humans, we are diverse and unique. So with that in mind, if you are interested, read on.

Sex, of some false vision of it, is almost inseparable from much of Western culture, and the image of women that it presents is commercialized through the mass media, which is itself a marketplace. Sex is shown as an act, like a football game, that men perform–under any circumstances. This is not illogical because men are asked to perform when their companions are ready–and if this isn’t the case, there is always whatever product will enhance their abilities—notably Viagra or Cialis. Males are seen as having none of the buffers and conditions that for women are the gatekeepers of their sexual experience. Although I suppose and argument could be made that gates are gates, and true liberation requires their removal, I suspect that many women would prefer to express themselves as they do, using the filters already in place: desires for commitment, intimacy, trust, honesty and of course passion, as well as more practical issues. involving sustenance and even survival. To combat these filters, or at least create the illusion that the filters can be changed, advertisers and capitalists promote the effect of expensive cars, diamond rings, champagne, essentially pimping out women to make the cash register ring. Nothing new here, but ideas that are worth writing down.

Linda Troeller has quite courageously set out to document women’s pleasure, not for the benefit of men, but for the elucidation of all of us, and to cut through some of the false messages that mass media delivers. My role was to help give Linda’s images their first home on the web, and to try and stay out of the way. I look at this work as an opportunity to see women through their own eyes, and although this may be disturbing, something I want to reject in favor of a myth that will help me prop up my own dick, to be direct, I am willing to take that small step.

The work has been widely seen, we have had more that 8,000 vistors in only a few days, but there seems to be a reluctance to comment publicly on the story. A lot of the discussion that I anticipated, hasn’t happened. I think its in part due to the same syndrome. Men prefer not to know. Women already understand much of what is shown and written, but maybe prefer to cultivate the myth themselves, or just don’t want to go there? These aren’t just issues that are expressed in art, they are part of the landscape that we have to navigate in our daily lives. In the internet age, we are increasingly exposed to more and graphic depictions of sex, at an early age, than ever before. Sexual movies and images are no longer peddled from under rain-coats. They are easily searched on Google and the iconization of sexual objects apparently has no limit. For those who are shy about searching out pornography, there are a wide range of artists who provide a close proximity to them, including photographers who profit by degrading themselves or the people around them and photographing the results. And perhaps for obvious reasons we feel more comfortable talking about sex shown in this less intimate way, because its reduced to a act that has no relation to our feelings. The reason we are reluctant to really look at Linda Troeller’s work on orgasm is that it shows that women are more likely to really enjoy sex when it is connected to actual love and the feeling of being loved and nurtured, in short something that males may find a distraction, in are perhaps wired to ignore. Not all, of course, but many, including me.

 

 

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Homeless in New Orleans

Homeless In New Orleans

The photographs in this special issue of 100Eyes were made during the photo workshop I taught in New Orleans last month during Photo NOLA. The work was so good, that I thought it important that it needed to be seen by a wider audience. A week after the photographers left town, 8 young people were killed when a ramshackle abandoned warehouse they were living in burned to the ground. The death of the kids, who were demeaned in some places as gutter punks and freeloaders, was controversial as it was tragic. Although most of the photography in this piece is of the chronically homeless– people who have for whatever reason become homeless and remained that way through parts of their adult lives–the deaths of the travellers, transients in most cases by choice, taught me that the two groups had a lot in common. There remains a possibility that one of the women photographed by us was killed in the blaze. Lexie panhandled and lived in the same area that the tragedy occurred. We are hoping for the best.

The homeless come to New Orleans for much the same reason that everyone else does. Some are born here. Others just happened to find their way to the Big Easy, for a job, for Mardi Gras, or to start a new life. Some are fleeing abusive relationships, or just can’t live with their family. Some are travellers who are just passing through on their way to someplace else, incapable or not wanting to participate in society. The cities large number of abandoned houses provide shelter for those with enough initiative to find them– in fact thousands of people are estimated to be living in abandoned houses all over the city.

But, many of those who are least able to help themselves end up on the street, living alone, in small groups, dependent on handouts from New Orleanians for food and clothing and sometimes panhandling at traffic lights for booze and cigarette money, or for money to spend a night in a cheap hotel. We found a group of homeless last week when the South was in a deep freeze, huddled on a cold sidewalk across the interstate from The Mission, a privately run shelter, the most visible one in the city, that sits just off Expressway that connects the East and West Banks of the Mississippi River. Most in the small group intended to remain outside that night, preferring to take their chances in the cold rather than heading across the street and standing in line to be allowed into the Mission. “I’d rather take my chances here,” said India, who was the first to camp on the spot, on a patch of concrete under a browned palm tree. There was talk about the $5.00 that the Mission was now charging for a night on a cot. Although on a freeze night the Mission was forced by law to accept all the men and women it could without charge, many on were skeptical. “If there aren’t enough beds they might take us to jail,” said Metal, a 28year old from San Diego, named after his taste in music.

This anti-Mission group seemed more self-reliant, than those in line across the street. There were accusations that the formerly homeless couple that ran the Mission kept all the best food for themselves. Like most such shelters, the Mission is high on Christianity, and a religious service is mandatory. And paying $5.00 to spend the night, often forced a choice between the cheap alcohol at the corner store or a night inside. Most in India’s group would rather take their chances in the cold than deal with the men who waited on line to get into the Mission.

Their patch of sidewalk India found was a few blocks from the Amtrak Station (which had doubled as a jail in the days after Katrina) and a bit further from the Superdome where the Saints play. He had quickly been joined by Rocky, then Metal, and Marguerite with her husband Walter. The benefit of camping out as a group was that they were easily found by New Orleanians looking to give away food and clothing. That and the camaraderie, which is a part of the fabric of life in the Big Easy, from Uptown to the Lower Ninth Ward. Mostly they did nothing but sit around. Sometimes the day would be broken up by a bit of drama, as when a car careened into the sidewalk outside the Mission on the other side of the Interstate, sending seven people to University Hospital. But for the most part they sat, in the cold, or slept under heavy blankets, or Rocky, in his tent. They hated weeks when the Saints played a home game, because the police would come by a few days in advance and force them off the sidewalk, normally under the Interstate. Why the police allowed them under the Interstate but not on the sidewalk no one knew, but regardless few of the homeless were Saints fans.

The proximity to the Amtrak Station, which doubled as the Greyhound Terminal, seemed ironic, as most in the group said they were headed out of town, but had gotten stuck for some reason or another, and had no way to raise the money for a bus ticket. The constant noise of traffic on the interstate served as a reminder of people who were going somewhere, whether it be just across the River to the West Bank, or perhaps headed towards Baton Rouge and west from there. The weight of addiction, to alcohol, marijuana and cheap cigarettes, which seemed to be always dangling off of their rough fingers, pulled them down, like birds without wings. They all aspired for more, but had settled for a life on the streets, which was something familiar, a life that they didn’t like, but could live with. There was no sense of time under the highway. The group rarely knew the day of the week, or the month for that matter. They were shackled by an inability to deal with society, with family, with an employer. They were getting by, and for the most part, that was enough.

Holding cardboard signs and looking for spare change, the homeless are part of the American bad dream, a grim reminder to many of lives gone bad, or people too weak to compete. A large encampment of homeless that had gathered under the Claiborne overpass in New Orleans, was disbanded by the Nagin Administration in the years after Hurricane Katrina. In San Francisco it is rumored that the city actually put homeless on buses to Portland, where the group is well-represented on the sidewalks of the downtown area, and until recently, sleeping under the overpasses. In Portland, as in many American cities, the homeless are evicted from their encampments during the holiday season.

America is a wealthy country, and its wealth has fortunately absorbed many of those who perhaps, given a less forgiving country, might also be camped out under the nation’s interstates. Or maybe it is there that they are headed, as the nations ability, and desire, to pay for social programs seems to wane, as the need increases. Larger cities, with the ability to make life for the homeless difficult, or ship them more or less willingly out of town with much desired bus tickets to another city, pass the problem on to smaller or hospitable cities, which often have less resources to assist the men in women in finding a sustainable lifestyle, which most often involves providing them with a means to find even minimal employment. Unfortunately, a job in McDonalds does not pay enough for even the rental of the most basic apartment, and often the homeless lack any of the documentation needed to gain state assistance and live in the welfare bubble. Dealing with the bureaucracy requires a set of skills that might require a continuing education course in themselves., and the budgets for groups that might potentially provide this kind of assistance are often minimal and have to be used on basic needs like temporary shelters and food, rather than the long-term programs that might help integrate the homeless back into the mainstream of society.

Unlike the homeless who are on the street due to circumstance, the homeless travelers and “gutter punks” are often homeless by choice. This group is a more heterogeneous than many think, some proportion of them coming from middle-class or in some cases wealthy families, choosing to live on the fringes of society rather than hold down jobs. Among them though are college students who can’t afford traditional housing, and many who are unemployable either by an unwillingness to work or by the expectations of those who might employ them. Will Burger King hired someone with a tattooed face to work at the drive-in counter? Most corporations have strict rules about dress and body art. Although discrimination because of race is theoretically illegal, discrimination because of personal decisions about body styling and dress is certainly not. The result is that in many cases members of the alternative culture couldn’t get employment even if they wanted it. Whether this group truly falls into the category of homeless is arguable. Many would say that they are not homeless at all, but simply live without the traditional shelter of a home or rented apartment. The argument could be made that a “home” involves more than a roof and walls, and that a true home exists only in the context of a community. Those in the counter-culture may often have a community and a family structure that is stronger than a single mother living in the suburbs with her small children.

Will many of these travelers remain homeless throughout their lives? Only a very small percentage of the “hippies” that trekked across America to the streets of Haight-Ashbury in the 60’s, remained on the edge of society. But with the continued shrinkage of the American economy isn’t it possible that the homeless population will continue to grow. As a friend of mine warned me over coffee the other morning, “In the future grandma and grandpa may be having Thanksgiving under the interstate.”

Andy Levin

100Eyes is an online photographic showcase featuring contemporary photography including documentary, art, and alternative photojournalism. Edited and created by Andy Levin, 100Eyes is made possible by the generosity of photographers who donate their work in the spirit of a shared photographic community.