Nancy & Frank, 1974

Nancy & Frank.

Main Street, Clarion PA, during the 1974 Autumn Leaf Festival. Photo by Tom DiStefano.

From a series of photographs of this annual celebration in this small Western Pennsylvania town. The background suggests a crowd, as does the look on the man's face - suggesting general revelry. The woman looks... alive, in the moment; maybe slightly surprised by the photographer (while the man seems unaware or oblivious).

The expression on the man's face at first seems as if he's calling out to someone out of the frame. But the more you look at it, it looks more like he wants to proclaim that life, at least in this moment, is good. He seems to understand that good is bad's fraternal twin. But it doesn't matter. Nothing lasts. Now is good.

The lines of the photo's composition arc upwards, from lower left to top right. It's that upward arc that seems, to me, so expressive of the early-mid-1970s.

Lives in Images....

Martin Sheen and Ava Gardner

Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould

Miles Davis and Jeanne Moreau

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

George Burns and Ray Bradbury

Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra

Phil Silvers and Zero Mostel

Brendan Behan and Jackie Gleason

Milton Berle and Marlene Dietrich

I don't know what it is precisely about these images that caught my attention. Certainly some of the pairings are incongruous - Gleason and Behan, Burns and Bradbury and so forth - but the apparant incongruity is a superficial one. It is more a kind of unmasking of the celebrity persona and suggests a closer peek at the person inside. Others, the one of Phil Silvers and Zero Mostel, suggest the furnace of energy that fuled the comedy of both men.

It is simply pleasing to see Sartre and de Beauvoir smiling together. It reminds me of their graves, side by side in the cemetery at Montparnasse, a weathered pack of Kool cigarettes and lighter left by some flowers.

Some of the images present all sorts of questions. I know, for example, exactly what I will ask Martin Sheen if I ever meet him.

Robert & Jack at the IMA....

"That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that's what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eig ht states in an old used car (on Guggenhiem Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genuis, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film." - Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to The Americans.




It was a good 4th of July. Our friend Laura drove over from Indiana, PA ("I'd come more often if we could move Ohio") with her miniature Daschund, Dash, and we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art in the afternoon.

Laura is a fabric artist and interested in all related things; the museum had a display of a bunch of original Halston gowns, which were nice, but not my reason for wanting to go.

I wanted to see "the scroll."

Drawing on his notes and journals from his cross-country travels from 1947-50, Jack Kerouac wrote his first draft of On the Road over a three week period in April of 1951. Kerouac taped sheets of teletype paper together so they would run through his manual typewriter, enabling him to keep his flow of writing uninterrupted. The result was a 120-foot continuous “scroll” manuscript.

In May of 2001 Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts NFL team, paid $2.4 million dollars at auction for the original scroll. The purchase sparked some controversy in the Art World at the time and generated a very, very strange feature article in an August 2002 issue of The Chicago Tribune.

After a rocky start, Irsay has become a very responsible owner, first allowing the rare documents experts at Indiana University to take the fragile roll of paper and stabilize its condition, then sending the scroll, in effect, "on the road" across the US. The scroll began its official tour in Orlando in January 2004 and is scheduled to conclude at the end of 2009.

At the IMA the scroll is in a long glass case stretched out to a bit over half its length (for the second half of its stay it will be switched to reveal the last section). Off to the side of the gallery is a small room with a small desk and an old Underwood typewriter, the same vintage that Kerouac used, in which a scroll of paper has been inserted and visitors are invited to sit down and type whatever stream of consciousness words might come to mind. The keys of the typewriter are in dire need of some oil and stick together pretty much every time you type a letter which, I suspect, is intended to encourage brevity.

In 1959 Kerouac went on the Steve Allen television program and read a passage from his novel while Allen played a piano accompaniment. It is one of the many examples of why the 1950s were way, way hipper than we were lead to believe. I can't imagine what a comparable thing on network TV in 2008 could be.

Later, Kerouac wrote:

remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank Studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce's stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, "I don't have to REHEARSE for God's sake Steve!" - "But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone of your voice, just this last time, I'll let you off the dress rehearsal" and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches, finally I say "No I can't do it" and I go across the street and get drunk, but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and won't talk love because in Hollywood man, love is for sale.

But the big surprise for me was the exhibit of eighty-two original Robert Frank photographs that are set up to surround the scroll. I think Franks images are to the American landscape what Henri Cartier-Bresson's are to the streets of Paris. The photos on display all come from his collection, The Americans, described very well at a Yale website:

"In 1955, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank traveled throughout the United States by car and returned with a bleak portrait of what the American road had to offer. As Kerouac writes in his introduction, Frank's photographs had "sucked a sad, sweet, poem out of America," a sadness found in the forlorn looks of dime store waitresses, funeral attendees, and human faces rendered unrecognizable in the glare of jukeboxes. The slightly offset angles and the blurred focus of many of the photographs suggest the nervousness and dislocation of the people they capture. Frank dispels any romantic notions of the lingering pioneer spirit of America by presenting a landscape of people and places absent of hope and promise."

The third photograph above, the bell of the Sousaphone under the patriotic bunting, titled "Political Rally" violates most rules of photographic composition and presents a timeless image of the banality of the American political process. I don't like to play favorites, but it's the one to beat.

Walking the Dogs: History in the Dust Bin & Other Stories

Friday morning, ten, ten fifteen, I took the dogs for a walk. Across the street from our house is an empty double; two apartments that have been empty for the past five or six years. Before that it was a problematic property, rented by a succession of young couples answering a casting call for COPS. Drunks shouting in the street at three in the morning; young women crying, running down the sidewalk with a baby in tow; the inevitable arrival of the squad cars… that sort of thing.

Our bedroom faces the street and the soft blue, red, and yellow pulse of police lights on the wall in the middle of the night does interesting things to your dreams.

Now whoever owns the place has had workers for the past month or so, gutting the inside and remodeling. The main guy is an ex-con, covered with jailhouse tattoos. He likes the dogs and we stop and chat whenever we go by and he’s there. I think one of the problems with prison must be leaving it behind once you don’t live there anymore. Almost every conversation leads to another story about something he doesn’t do anymore that put him in prison before. One morning he was all bruised up and told me he’d been jumped by five Mexicans in the parking lot of an East Side bar a few nights earlier. Something about an argument over how much they were to be paid for some drywall work, he showed me a gash on the side of his head where he was hit with a club.

“But they never got me down; then I got back to my truck and got my knife.” That’s as much information as he gives me and as much as I need.

But, I digress.

This Friday he wasn’t there, the house was closed up, but on the grass by the sidewalk were two trash cans and, as we passed I noticed a pile of photographs inside at the top.

This has happened to me once before. In the late 1980s I was in San Francisco for some academic conference and on a rainy evening walking to a restaurant with friends, I found a big pile of old family photos lying in a gutter. I saved the ones that weren’t ruined by the water, maybe 100-150 in all. They told the story of a guy who’d been in the US Navy and went to the South Pacific in the Second World War and then spent time in Japan where he met and married a Japanese woman and moved back to San Francisco where he worked as a bartender. The photos were all in black & white and included family gatherings, friends, visits to Japan; each photo had torn pits of black paper on the back from where they had been glued in a photo album. Why they were ripped from that album and tossed in the gutter – as opposed to simply throwing the entire album in the trash – remains a mystery.


This time it was an African-American family, and the photographs go back to the 1930s or 40s and run up toward the end of the 1980s. There are four photo albums and another hundred or more loose photos as well. They chronicle weddings, births, deaths and funerals. There are pictures of black men in uniform at the end of WWII. The photos seem to represent Indianapolis, Kentucky and Philadelphia as the locations for gatherings and relations.

One friend I emailed the photos to replied that the 1930 census shows no Jesse Dixon in Indiana, but shows six Jesse Dixon's in Kentucky (2 in Jefferson and one each in Boyd, Floyd, Hardin, and Lewis). This is, I imagine, the sort of stuff a journalist might do in a search for survivors.

There’s an official file photo of a fortyish-year old black woman from the Philadelphia Naval Ship Yards in Philadelphia and, near that, is a page of photos of various children and adults taken at different Philadelphia tourist locations.

The photos from the 1970s are great; all the men have enormous afros and look like members of Parliament Funkadelic.


I’ve gone through the photos three times now. The first time I was just overwhelmed by the amount and variety of images. The second time I found myself looking at all the children; baby pictures, five and six year olds playing in yards, and thinking about the roughly 12% of all black men in their 20s in prisons in the US. According to “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008,” published by the Pew Center on the States, one in nine Black men between the ages of 20-34 are incarcerated compared to one in 30 other men of the same age. Like the overall adult ratio, one in 100 Black women in their mid-to-late 30s is in prison. I find it impossible to look at these photos and not think of that.


The third time I went through these an interesting thing happened. They turned into my family photos. They became everyone’s family photos; the same odd composition, the same weddings, the same parties, the same vacations. The ones from the late 40s and 50s are the most “posed.” Getting your picture taken was a bigger deal then. Some of the photos are actually post cards, a practice common to the times when you were going to be sending out the photos of a new baby or a cousin or nephew who just finished basic training.

The 1960s were the time for glossy black & white snapshots. Everybody had a camera by now. Photos become more common and plentiful, more casual and less posed. This is the time of the tilted angles, strangely cropped images and odd accidental lighting effects. I love photos from that era. The 1960s were a period of unbridled possibility; the people in these photographs look like they’re at the beginning of a great adventure.


In the 1970s and 1980s the photos shift again to hundreds of Polaroid pictures, rich, saturated colors, softer focus, even more casual. *These photos end in the late 1980s. Our paths, the people in these photos and mine, just missing as I think whoever the person was who lived in that house was gone by 1987, the year we arrived in Indianapolis and a couple years before we bought the house across the street.


One photo in particular seems to be a metaphor for the entire journey of this family through time. There are two young men in naval uniforms, side by side. The photo was either in direct sunlight for a long time or wasn’t fixed properly when it was printed but the image has almost disappeared. The sailors, once proud and full of energy and promise, are now the ghosts of sailors, almost entirely gone from this world.


And the visual history of our lives has been transformed yet again as we move into the new century. Now, instead of boxes of photos and albums bulging with wedding and vacation photos, we have hard drives stuffed with images. Digital photography means that taking 600 photos of your weekend in St. Louis is no big thing. It will be old PCs sitting out for the trash in the days ahead, and nothing to catch the attention of dog walkers in the future.

Everyday in Indianapolis, like every day in every city and town in America, the Sanitation Department comes and picks up the trash and I suspect trashcans stuffed with family histories are not that uncommon and may even collectively represent their own layer in every landfill in the country.

Americans are more nomadic than most other developed nations. I don’t know if it’s far less common for family photos to end up in the dustbin in France or England but my guess is that it would be. The most amazing example of history pulled from the void at the last possible second I have experienced involves a fiery shoebox, Henry Miller and Man Ray, a story that can be found here.

Earlier today a reporter and photographer from The Indianapolis Star and a senior archivist of African-American History from the Indiana Historical Society came over and took the albums and photographs. We sat around for an hour or so looking through all of it; we walked to the empty house and met with the contractor who took us into the basement and garage where even more photos of the black family, and a whole new collection of family pictures of a white family, were discovered. The reporter will try and track down someone from the family who might be stunned to see what just escaped destruction. If no one can be found the photos will be archived at the Historical Society where they will become another set of pieces in an enormous and ever-growing family album.

This would never have happened if we still had cats.