AL So many opportunities . . .
DB And then he just shoved it all in a
closet and left home. When I became
interested in photography, my friend
asked me if I wanted the equipment.
I did, so my friend showed up at my
house with this small darkroom kit.
And just like when my band played in
our living room, my mother allowed me
after hours to set up a darkroom in her
kitchen!
AL In her kitchen! So she had to clean
up after dinner so you could pull out
your trays.
DB Exactly. All she said was, “Make
sure you clean up before I come down
in the morning, and I don’t wanna smell
anything.” So I would work around the
clock into the night and through the
early morning hours. Then I would stop
and spray some Glade air freshener,
knock everything down, and put everything under the sink before my mom
came down. While my parents didn’t
take me and my brother to museums
growing up, they were fully supportive of our creative pursuits, even though,
especially when I became interested in
photography, they had no idea how we
were going to turn these into something practical. All they knew was you
could be a wedding photographer.
AL Right.
DB To my parents, my options included
photographing babies or having a
portrait studio. They could not understand the context in which I was looking
at photography, but they supported it.
AL I think the earliest works of
photography that impressed you
were done in the studio, right? By
photographers like Richard Avedon
and Irving Penn.
DB Mike Disfarmer.
AL And Mike Disfarmer.
DB I saw work by these photographers in the ’70s. Early in my career,
I was making photographs in the street
with a small 35 mm camera, and yet
pictures by those photographers made
a strong impression on me, even with
no conscious sense that I might be
interested in making those same kinds
of pictures. I think what attracted me
to that work was that the subjects were
ordinary people, like Disfarmer’s folk
from Herber Springs, Arkansas.
AL Those are extraordinary.
DB Penn did the Small Trades
pictures. These were of ordinary people
in their workaday clothes who he
brought to the studio. And then Avedon
had a range of subjects. For the most
part, the work made by photographers
who I started to look at in the ‘70s was
interesting. The subjects, by and large,
were ordinary people, which clued me
into this idea that ordinary people could
be the subject in the making of resonant photographs.
AL But it was clear in your mind that
some of those photographers, like
Disfarmer, were not art photographers.
Can you talk about encountering Roy
DeCarava’s work in Langston Hughes’s
project? You realized that DeCarava’s
photographs weren’t photojournalism
and that the kind of work you were
doing actually could become art. It
could be self-motivated, and it could
have intentions, and it could be poetic
and powerful.
DB Oh yeah, DeCarava and Langston
Hughes’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life.
It’s interesting because early on I had
absolutely no sense of genre. This
idea that there was photojournalism,
that there was fine art, that there
was commercial photography . . . I just
gravitated toward what I thought
were interesting pictures. When you
think about it, some of Irving Penn’s
photographs look very much like
Mike Disfarmer’s photographs, even
though they were working with very
different purposes.
AL That’s very true.
DB Disfarmer was the neighborhood
photographer from Herber Springs, and
Penn was a highly successful commercial and art photographer working in
New York City. But for very different
reasons they both end up with these
ordinary people standing in front of
the camera. For Penn, it was a project.
For Disfarmer, it was a job; it was the
service that Disfarmer provided to the
community. For Avedon, it was his
own personal work, the thing that he
did commercially, but it was definitely
a project in a way that it wasn’t for
Disfarmer. But then DeCarava was a
particularly important revelation for me,
even though I didn’t get the full impact
of his work until I was able to stand in
front of it.
ALIn front of a real print.
DB The Sweet Flypaper of Life was a
very inexpensive publication.
AL There’s so much darkness that
doesn’t reproduce well in the book. I’m
thinking of Black skin in particular. The
shadows are also so important.
DB Those were not fine reproductions in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, at
least not in the monographic sense.
But I was intrigued by DeCarava’s
photographs for the fact that they
were interestingly made pictures
that were clearly not of the Gordon
Parks–documentary type. They were
also not photojournalism. They didn’t
seem to serve any function besides a
self-expressive one, which was prob-
ably why DeCarava had such a difficult
time getting that work published. And
then he showed it to Langston Hughes,
who said, “Well, why don’t you let me
write some text for these pictures?
Maybe I can get a publisher interested.”
The photographs were highly expressive in a subjective way, and they were
pictures of Black people in Harlem
in the 1950s. This idea of using the
camera expressively and doing that
with subjects who, again, were ordinary
subjects, ordinary African Americans,
didn’t make The Sweet Flypaper of Life
an easily publishable book. Eventually,
Simon & Schuster published it in
1955. I was impressed by DeCarava’s
vocabulary, both his formal vocabulary
and later, when I was able to stand in
front of the work and see, his material
vocabulary.
AL The medium of the work.
DB The way this man manipulated
the medium of photography in a highly
subjective and expressive way was also
a part of the work’s narrative about the
Black subject. DeCarava had a profound
influence on me, and he remains so
important to me. He was a Black
photographer who was working expressively within the medium rather than for
publication. There was no apparent use
for this work other than for it to be on
a wall in a gallery or a museum and for
someone to stand in front of it and have
a different sense of what a photograph
could be and of how the world might
be reshaped through that experience.
DeCarava became a singular presence for me, in a similar way that John
Coltrane was musically. Between the
two of them, they’ve inspired and kept
me on track all these years.
