Mark Power Blog

 

This seems to be the Summer for eulogies…

 

Don Donaghy, 1991 by George Krause

 

 

 

I first met Don Donaghy, the photographer, when he was taking pictures in the early 60s. We met again in his last years when he had returned to photography after many years of pursuing other arts such as film-making and sculpture.

 

 

 

All photos by Don Donaghy unless otherwise specified.

All black-and-white images date from the 1960s. Click on image to enlarge.

 

 

 

As a young man, prowling the streets of Philadelphia and New York with his Leica in the 60s, Don was famously silent, and when we met again in 2005, he was no more talkative. But when he was young, you felt that silence was because he was thinking in images, not words. Sadly, when we met again after a gap of forty years or more, the silence seemed more problematic: Don would drift in and out of the present and would often have difficulty recalling events or people in his past, whether recent or far back in time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From about 1960 to 1970, when Don was in his twenties, he made some of the most compelling street photographs ever recorded. Although it is obvious Don’s spiritual brothers are Eugene Atget, Cartier-Bresson and his contemporaries George Krause, Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank, those influences in a Don Donaghy photograph melt into an vision uniquely Don’s own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was nothing on the street that escaped Don’s eye from the quickest gesture, to the most fleet expression, the most trivial object, to the street itself, a landscape of asphalt , brooding and desolate. This is our urban history seen at its rawest; a vision at once anguished and beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Jane Livingston [author of  The New York School, Photographs 1936-63 which featured the first publication of Donaghy images in many years] said:”Don Donaghy’s photographs of the early 1960s are among the most beautiful images made in the history of American photography.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After that amazingly productive decade, Don, feeling his photography had reached a dead end, “dropped out” to use his own words, tuning in to the counter-culture, moving first to Woodstock where he met his present wife, Maggie, then on to Boulder, Colorado where found his art in sculpture, painting, and film-making, while supporting himself and family with construction jobs. In addition to his wife, Maggie, he is  survived by a sister, Leslie Donaghy and his three children, Steve Harley, and daughters, Mahala Donaghy and Halona Donaghy .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only in the last twenty years of his life or so did Don return to photography; this time in color, photographing still-lives and landscapes. If his earlier work is taut with a mixture of despair and beauty, his  color work is serene and contemplative, perhaps reflecting his turn towards Buddhism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What made Don give up photography for twenty years or more? Don himself said it best in a statement written for a Guggenheim application in 1991, the only time on record he talks about his work:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Statement: After completion of a four year major in commercial art at the “prestigious” Philadelphia Museum School of Art, one might assume that I would seek employment in this field. However, I found myself driven to wander the streets of Philly, searching for images in order to learn to use my camera. An afternoon job delivering flowers to hospitals and funeral homes left my mornings free for taking photos and my evenings for developing films in the clothes closet.

 

 

 

 

 

I kept my photography as a very personal and pure pursuit of art throughout my remaining years in Philadelphia and in New York City. I compiled a huge portfolio during these years and though my work was included in museum collections, numerous shows and magazine publications, I found myself disillusioned, exhausted and unable to continue.

I defensively decided that photography must be a limited medium in which I had accomplished all that could be done. To seal this theory, my camera and all my equipment were stolen! [ in 1969.]

It was only after “dropping out”, spending my time painting and sculpting, moving to Woodstock, and then to Boulder, Colorado, where I met a Buddhist teacher, that I had a glimpse of understanding that there was no ax to grind.

So, again, I bought a camera. I started over, working mostly with color and feeling like a fledgling photographer. Over these last twenty years, I have again found the passion for capturing the moment, but perhaps without quite so much expectation. Don Donaghy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don Donaghy, an important if largely neglected figure in the history of photography, died july 23, 2008. There is no one iconic Donaghy image although some have been reproduced a number of times; one might say all of Don’s black and white street photographs are iconic. This Fall, Nazraeli press is planning to publish a book of Don’s photography. Perhaps now his work will gain the larger recognition it deserves.

 

 

 

 

Mark L. Power

Don Donaghy and friends, July 2005.

from L.to R.: Kevin Heidt, Don, Maggie Donaghy, Mahala Donaghy,

Joe Mills, Norman Carr, Paul Roth, and Mary Del Populo.

 

 

Don’s obituary is at www.dailycamera.com/obits/2008/jul/25/don-donaghy/. He has a website at www.dondonaghy.com and also has an entry in Wikipedia where you can see his publication and exhibition lists.

 

 

The  dustcover of my daughter Nani’s fourth book, Feed the Hungry, “a memoir with recipes”. Her other three books are novels, also bursting with delectable edibles both for the mind and the stomach. ( quotes from the book in italics).  

Feed the Hungry is a book about hunger…it is the invisible chain that threads our memories to our hearts..woven of culture and nostalgia…

 

 

click on most photos to enlarge

Nani in 1962, not yet a year old, photographed in Los Angeles where she was born. I was going to art school at the time, hence this arty picture. I was prevailed upon to dispense with artiness so I dutifully recorded Nani as Jackie Gleason, a resemblance that was mercifully shortlived.

 

 

In her memoir, Nani describes the descent to my parent’s basement kitchen as: the smell was earthy stone and a healthy waft of moss..one felt an unconscious surge as one came down the stairs, a Jungian journey into something unspoken and magical…

 

1967: Nani, five years old

 

The book is indeed a Jungian journey  through  a maze of family joys and secrets via the alimentary canal. When the child Nani wasn’t reading cookbooks and experimenting with recipes she was observing with a sharp eye: Nobody cries at funerals or anywhere, dry little conversations, handshakes, ham biscuits, bourbon…things are not what they seem, appearances are everything.

 

The dustcover picture, Nani, ten years old. 1972

 

Food and family: the food is love; the family is loss. Is this what it’s like getting old? All the foundations crumble until you’re alone on the sand..when did everything change? When did the islands fade, the family become scattered across continents like confetti?

 

1974: Nani, age 12. Rachel, her half-sister in the pool

 

But if memories only wound, there is always food for solace: You’ll find recipes for lobster rolls, fried green tomatoes, Virginia ham, squash casserole and damson pie…and many more.

 

 

Nani at 17: 1979

So we went chop, chop, chop, across the water, hair flying.

 

As Nani broadened her horizon, the recipes and the adventures became ever more exotic. I have traveled through countries by route of the stomach..there were years ..of black beans and smoked meats, forofa and cachaca because I was immersed in Brazil..or a sushi mat, sushi vinegar or a prized sashimi knife…

Traveling in Peru, Nani observed: a spectacular woman sung in a red satin sheath, I didn’t catch the lyrics, I just heard amor, amor,amor

 

Wedding portrait, July, 1990

 

But still the family turns the screw: My grandparents.. did not come my wedding ..was it because [my husband] was Jewish?

I hasten to add these were her maternal grandparents; my parents only attended in spirit as they had died earlier. Aside from noting her grandparent’s absence,  Nani doesn’t talk much about her wedding in Feed the Hungry but I can tell you about it since I was there. It was on July 4, 1990, out at our farm in Virginia. Her maternal grandparents may not have come but everyone else was there, including all three of my wives.

The service was ecumenical with my old friend, the Reverend Elijah White (Episcopal) and a young rabbi amicably paired as representatives of their various deities. Came the moment when Lige asked, is there anyone here who wishes to object to the union of this man and woman? and I distinctly heard my Uncle Ross, a staunch Roman Catholic, mutter, “Well, somebody should.” At least he had the grace not to object with his absence.

It was unbearably hot and humid and we had no air conditioning except for one window unit which went into the living room. Soon the wedding broke into two groups: a covey of old ladies, pallid and hollow-eyed, huddled about the air conditioner in the living room, and everyone else on the lawn sweating, drinking, hollering, and of course, diving into mounds of incredible food. It was a memorable Fourth.

 

 

Nani’s Persian period, 2005

 

Caviar, quormeh sabzi,..saffron and rosewater … a clear glass of amber liquid fragrant with bergamot, small sweets, shirni…tiny sour pickles, olives, stuffed grape leaves..checlo kabob..basmati rice..braised lamb shanks in saffron…

 

The ‘official’ book portrait by Yvonne Taylor, a Nani I have never met!

 

On cooking and writing: These impulses, cooking and writing come from the basic seed of love. We have been moved, touched, by the sensual experience of a great meal, a moving book. We would like somehow to harness this power and give it to others…stories start to tumble out as quickly as the memories of food, because they are all intertwined, food and memory, love and taste, all piecemeal of this lovely sensual world we live in…

 

An except from an email I sent Nani:

I am bowled over by your amazing memoir. it is a very fine book, your best piece of writing yet I think. I think the expectation was by me and maybe many others too, that it would a light-hearted look back along with some juicy recipes. You ease us in with the dustcover, giving little hint of the contents therein, and then you follow with your charming first chapter which is like a tinkling bell which hardly prepares us for the sturm und drang to follow. But soon we are witness to the agony of a family falling apart, more or less simply from the wheel turning, the effects of time, the tragedy that all is subject to change, no matter how hard you push to keep it from happening.

It is a  sad book, funny too, but filled with loss…and not only do you lay your mother’s family bare, you do the same to yourself which makes it a very honest book. …

I particularly liked your Peruvian section, why I don’t know exactly, it read like a novel. In fact, almost all the sections could make their own novel which gives the book its weight and gives you something to do for the next ten years!   Your last chapter was also especially good, wrapping things up with the opposite of the first chapter, not a tinkling anymore but a deep and rueful note of the bell.

 

More at www.nanipower.com.

 

 

A childhood friend died on June 19: Carl William Kimes, aged 71, of a stroke in Bethesda, Md.

I knew him by three names during his lifetime, Billy, his name during our childhood, Koonie, his nickname as a teen-ager, and Carl, his given name, by which he was known as an adult. To me, of course, and to his other friends from childhood, he was always Billy Kimes, although later we took to using his nickname of ‘Koonie’, how acquired a mystery to all.

Billy was an easygoing little boy, always amenable, always ready for any adventure. We did all the things boys in that Huckleberry Finn period before adolescence do: we rode our bicycles exploring the town we lived in, Leesburg, Virginia, then a little Southern village, now threatening to become a metropolis with strip malls covering our fields of play. 

Billy was exceptionally smart with an inclination towards science, and even as a boy he was an expert on geology ; he knew the names and ages of rocks and could find a gem as well as arrowheads in the dirt without much trouble. He was an good boy scout and with a skill I envied, could make maps with the aid of a compass almost before he could read. 

We were avid science fiction fans, devouring every copy of Amazing Planets we could find. We dreamt of a future with aliens threatening from the skies, automated cars and robots stalking the land, a future strangely devoid of people, economics or politics. But if Billy was disappointed by the future we later found ourselves in, a future, pretty much like the past, embroiled in politics and wars, he never let on. In fact, he seemed content  with the American bubble we inhabited; he had his two cars and his house more than four times the size of the house he grew up in, and he was obviously pleased with that aspect of the American dream.

 Billy grew up in what we would call marginal circumstances today although he and his family seemed unburdened by their situation. In the 50s his father, a skilled carpenter,  had a new car every other year; they fed themselves from an ample vegetable garden, and they owned a house. But it was a small bungalow, four rooms essentially, and Billy spent most of his childhood sharing a room with his grandfather, a circumstance about which he never once complained. I can tell you it made me a bit more circumspect about complaining about my own family situation – at least I had a room to myself.

However, I mention this because I think it had something to do with his life choices. He dropped out of college after a year, and went to work for Ma Bell, as the C&P telephone company was popularly known. When I asked why he didn’t stay in college, he said he was going to work his way up in the telephone company so he could retire at the age of 55. He was 17 years old when he plotted out this future, and sure enough, I found myself at his retirement party some 36 years later. He was 53.  I often think his years in that bedroom with his grandfather had a lot to do with that life decision when he put security ahead of risk. I never passed judgment because had I grown up in the same circumstances who’s to say I wouldn’t have done the same?

 We didn’t see much of one another as teen agers, our lives had gone in diffeent directions, but once in a while in a while we‘d get together and chase girls who always seemed to be a step ahead of us. Billy, by then known as Koonie, was not lucky in love. Nevertheless , he later managed two marriages and two sons and a daughter and  perhaps he found that kind of love a more than adequate substitute for the yearnings of romance.  

 As adults , we saw even less of one another as our lives, tastes, politics, and circumstances had almost completely diverged and all we really had in common,  if truth be known, were those few years in our  Huckleberry Finn childhood. But in the last decade or so, Koonie, ever the loyal friend, stayed in touch and when we would infrequently get together, most of our talk would be about those years which had entered into myth.

Koonie was found in his driveway, the victim of a severe stroke. I envy him his manner of death, fearful myself of a stay in those institutions which postpone death as long as possible. He was a few weeks older than me and of course, also lying in that driveway was part of my childhood.  

Koonie was not much of a sportsman, although he enjoyed fishing once in a while. He played golf in a manner which suggested he was scoring a 65 instead of the 100 plus recorded on his scoresheet. He was equally determined about tennis which he played as if the game was baseball. In other words, a good deal of time was spent looking in the woods for lost balls.  Koonie fervently believed in the second amendment and he had an impressive collection of firearms. Once in a while, he’d come out to our farm in Virginia and shoot up some targets with his black powder musket.

 

Here he is on one such day ( ca 1995) standing in front of my 8×10 camera with his son, Austin.

 

Carl ‘Koonie’ Kimes and Austin Kimes  

 

click on image to enlarge

 

When we are 15, we all feel as if we are beginning to become somebody else. Lise Sarfati

 

Lise Sarfati, Magnum

 

... the rites of passage, the birthdays, the bat mitzvahs, sweet sixteen parties, proms, online diaries, the first bra,  whispered secrets…The stammers, the pimples the awkwardness, the flush of embarrassment..

 

 

Rebecca Drobis

 

Coming of age, a common theme in literature and films, is no stranger to photography..as critic Sarah James observed in 2007: “Several young, newly prominent women photographers have more in common than their rising reputations. Trained in graduate programs in the late 90s, they tend to use adolescent girls as their subjects, prefer staged scenes to candid shots and often inject narrative elements into their pictures.“

 

 

Julia Fullerton-Batten

 

Since James made that observation ‘several’ has become many and as Sarah James observed, most are female photographers, most are relatively young, and many if not most, were trained in various graduate programs around the world.

 

 

The theme is adolescence; in particular, young girls ( with some exceptions) confronting their sexuality, their identity, their role in life. These young girls seem to want to escape from the frames of their images, and many avert their eyes, shielding themselves from the camera.

The artist’s strategies range from documentary narratives to surreal tableaux, and ‘candid shots’ are a stronger element of this collective work than critic James allows. And as Kelli Connell observes about her own autobiographical work “A questioning of sexuality and gender roles that shape the identity of  the self in intimate relationships” is often a component.

 

 

Hellen van Meene

 

Precursors to this movement, if it is a movement ( all it needs is a name; suggestions welcome) are Sally Mann’s work with her family and to lesser extent, Cindy Sherman and Tina Barney’s work. Reneke Dijkstra’s portraits have undoubtably been an influence and I would imagine there’s a touch of Nan Goldin in some of this new work also.

 

 

Reneke Dijkstra

 

Here are nine women photographers who at various times have explored the world of the female adolescent and no doubt there are others:

 

Kelli Connell,  Rebecca Drobis, Blake Fitch, Julia Fullerton-Batten,  Anna Gaskell,  Annaleen Louwes, Hellen van Meene,  Michelle Sank, and  Lise Sarfati.

 

 

               

Anna Gaskell

 

These artists with their common themes,  span the globe: Kelli Connell is American, as is Rebecca Drobis, a colleague of mine at Photoworks in Glen Echo, Maryland, where we teach. Blake Fitch is from North Carolina. Julia Fullerton-Batten lives in England. Anna Gaskell is from Iowa. Annaleen Louwes is Dutch as is Hellen van Meene. Michelle Sank, currently living in England, is from South Africa. Lise Sarfati is Algerian, grew up in France and was educated in Russia.

 

 

Michelle Sank

 

Annaleen Louwes

 

Postscript: Alert reader Space Traveler pointed out another photographer working with adolescent girls: Lauren Greenfield. Lauren is also the creator of a number of evocative videos on that subject and many others. Here is the cover picture for her book Girl Culture:

 

 

Lauren Greenfield

 

 

 

Sites where you can see more work from these artists:

Blake Fitch:www.blakefitchphotos.com/
Rebecca Drobis: www.rebeccadrobis.com/
Julia Fullerton-Batten: www.juliafullerton-batten.com
Kelli Connell: http://www.kelliconnell.com/
Michelle Sank: www.michellesank.com
Hellen van Meene: http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/hellen-van-meene/index.html
Anna Gaskell: http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_191_6.html
Annaleen Louwes: http://www.vanzoetendaal.nl/annaleenlouwes/
Lise Sarfati: www.magnumphoto.com ( search Lise Sarfati)