You have to become invisible

Eddie Cuevas talks to gang members at a midnight meeting in a schoolyard.

 

The Street Gang Story

 

August 25, 1972 was the publication date of one of my most important picture stories. It was entitled The ‘Prez’ of the Reapers. A profile of Eddie Cuvas and his 200 member gang, The Reapers, it ran for over 10 pages.

I pitched my boss, picture editor Ron Bailey, on the idea of doing a picture story on a city street gang since street gangs had come roaring back in New York and other major cities. The fact that gangs were springing up all over the country interested Ron. He approved the idea. My mentor, Gordon Parks, had done a famous story on a Harlem gang leader named Red Jackson in 1948. Gordon’s story had been in black and white. I wanted to work in color and use only natural light. High speed Ektachrome was the fastest color slide film at that time. It had a film speed of 160 but you could push it in the lab and double or even triple the speed. However the more you pushed the film, the more monochromatic it became. Still I felt that color was the way to go; it would better capture the feeling of the times.

My first challenge was to find a gang. I first looked at the gangs in Chinatown. There were 10 -15 large gangs, but on my third day walking Chinatown’s mean streets with a M6 Leica tucked under my arm, I was approached from behind by a group of young kids with metal tire irons and told to leave now or later in a box. I knew then something that every photojournalist has to learn. To do a good picture you have to become invisible and there was no way I could do that in Chinatown. I looked at gangs in Harlem but concluded that my story would be too much like Gordon’s, and that would never do. My next stop was the Bronx.

The Bronx in the early1970’s had the greatest number of gangs and while I didn’t speak Spanish, I looked the part. I didn’t take a camera with me on the first series of trips to the Bronx. I wanted to get a sense of the place and its people without a camera tucked under my arm. I walked the streets of the South Bronx for about a week looking for the right gang to photograph.

The South Bronx at the time was a tough place to work as a photographer. On every corner there was someone with a challenge--who was I, were did I get all the camera equipment, why did I want to take their picture? My lack of Spanish made coming up with answers to all these questions hard at first. That was until I realized that more than half the young men I met spoke a combination of Spanish and English, Spanglish, as we later called it. And with some patience, I began to understand why the gangs were so important for the young guys I met. Many had no fathers and the gang became family-- a group that looked out for one another and were there to support each other if someone needed help or a strong shoulder to lean on.

I had been up all night and was nursing a cup of strong coffee when I met Eddie Cuevas. Eddie was on his was into a local bodega. I had parked my tired frame on the front steps and was sipping coffee. Eddie tripped over my feet as he entered and gave me a look that was meant to kill.

Cuevas was about five ten and thin as a rail. While he might have seemed small at first, once he spoke a larger than life image filled your mind. He was a leader, it was clear without being told. Fast Eddie, they called him on the street: President of the Reapers and the king of Tremont Avenue.  I told him what I wanted to do and he said that I needed to come back. He had to check me out. I returned several days later and because of my stories about Attica, the Black Panthers, and Muhammad Ali, I seemed to pass muster.

Eddie impressed me for his cunning and understanding of people. We quickly became close. He loved art and had painted all the gang colors on members’ jackets. He loved the comics and had followed my father’s comic strip, Quincy. We lived together for six weeks. We formed a bond and Fast Eddie took me everywhere he went. He allowed me to go war with him when the Reapers fought the Black Spades, a rival street gang, and I took pictures as we went on a gun-buying trip when the Reapers purchased a 50-caliber machine gun.

Unintended consequences: After the story came out the police followed Eddie’s every move. Once he had a national spotlight on him they seemed to feel it was their job to bring him down. Within weeks Eddie was charged with attempted murder. I somehow felt responsible and helped Eddie get a lawyer. There was no real case against him and the charges were thrown out of court. What I saw was a young man with talent and potential who needed a break. I was able to help him get a job painting sets at the Metropolitan Opera and he left his gang life behind.

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It was worth the broken lens

Covering the funeral of John Kennedy

When Senator Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest alongside his slain brothers, John and Robert, at Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday evening, we all witnessed the end of an era. Kennedy had served for 47 years in the Senate. Some say he was the last of the great liberals. For me his passing took me back 46 years. Edward Kennedy was just finishing his first year as a Senator when his brother John was assassinated.

Look magazine photographer Arthur Rothstein asked me to assist him when he covered the funeral of John Kennedy. Monday, November 25, 1963 was a sad day in America. However, while most of the nation mourned the passing of a great president, it was a moment that would change my life. On the way to Washington Arthur, told me that I could take pictures and said that he had arranged for me to have press tags so that I could move around. ‘Take as many pictures as you can of people grieving’ he told me. I was still a kid and the great gravity of the day was not completely clear to me; all I knew was that this was my chance if I could only make some good pictures.  

I found it hard to move around at first. There were hundreds of photographers and reporters working the event. Many had gotten there early an picked out what they thought would be a good spot to cover the event. Never having worked an event like this, I kept moving around shooting over the shoulders or under the legs of other photographers. More than once I was told to move because I was blocking someone’s shot. I didn’t care-- I just wanted to take pictures. I knew that the service was taking place at St. Matthews Cathedral. St Matthews is about four blocks from the White House so I worked my way to a spot just across the street.  With Arthur’s words fixed in my mind, I shot pictures of grief--crying faces, people holding hands. But somehow I knew that the honor guard who would take the coffin to the Arlington National Cemetery was the key to something good. I figured that if I kept an eye on them I might be able to get a good picture of the family.

The private service at St. Matthews lasted over an hour. A reviewing stand had been set up across the street from the church. Seeing an empty spot on the top row, I climbed up the outside of the scaffold like structure just as the coffin was being taken from the church. Luck was on my side that day. It was a perfect spot.  Before I left for Washington with Arthur my father had helped me buy a preset 200mm lens. Thinking I might need it to take close-ups. I had been having trouble focusing the lens stopped down so I left it wide open. My pictures would all be over exposed but at least they would be sharp.  I lifted my new 200mm to my eye just as Jackie Kennedy leaned over to John-John and whispered something in his ear. John-John looked at his father’s coffin and made a crisp salute as the coffin departed. I had my picture. A moment later I was pulled from the stand by a member of the Secret Service. I fell about 10 feet to the ground and landed on my new lens, cracking the front element.

            While there were thousands of pictures made that day, I feel that my picture was one of the best. It took me awhile to make a good print from the over-exposed negative and as a result my image was not among the first wave of pictures to run. But when it did it became one of the most widely used. The over-exposure gave me a great deal of detail in the dark areas of the picture. Jackie’s face was a portrait of stoic grief rendered in a haunting way that captured her sorrow.

Luck – and the fearlessness of youth – were on my side that day. It was worth the broken lens.

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The Closer

Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier

A hot, rough wind blew in from the sea, bending the Miami Beach palm trees and rattling the half-open windows of the Fifth Street Gym. I was in a place suspended in time, a monument built on sweat and rum bottles filled with water for the swigging. Muhammad Ali was standing in the ring, leaning on the ropes, catching his breath and looking out at 80 or 90 people who had paid $1 each to see him train.

 

It was my second day on a journey that ultimately would lead to the center of Madison Square Garden. Ali would face Joe Frazier in a slugfest that had been billed as the ‘Fight of the Century.’

 

Ali, the ultimate showman, seemed removed from the frenzy of the gym that day. He had boxed eight rounds, but they were not impressive. His trainer, Angelo Dundee, always said Ali was the worst gym fighter he ever saw, and that day was no exception. Then, as if struck by lightning, the athlete danced to the center of the ring and his hands moved so fast they became almost invisible; his stunned sparing partner stood helpless against the ropes. The bell sounded and the round was over.

 

Sonny Liston once said fighting Ali was like running through a fire wearing a gasoline raincoat. Like all great artists, Ali’s many moods directed his fight plan; it seemed to come from somewhere deep inside – a place that only he could see. He would lose his first fight against Frazier, but he would win the next two. After the series, neither man would ever be the same.

When I work on a picture story or when I write a story, the first thing I try to confront is how the story will start and how the story will end. In a picture story we call it the opener and the closer. The opening picture has to be one that will stop the reader and make them want to read the story. The closing picture is one that ties the story together. It’s the last thing that people see and the picture often that’s most remembered. In my story for Life magazine I cover the training camps of both fighters as they prepared for the big fight. The pictures I made at the training camps were strong but I need an image that would tie it all together. The story would run before the fight so photographing the winner was not an option. My time was running out I had two days left to finish my story.

As luck would have it on my last day at Frazier’s Philadelphia camp Ali who lived in Cherry Hill, New Jersey at that time, came to visit the Frazier camp. In typical Ali fashion he taunted Joe from outside a window. Frazier spotted him and walked to the window making a fist. I had my closer.

 

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Symbolism

 

Attica Prison 1972

 

Attica always had the potential for tragedy. Its 30-foot walls held some of the toughest convicts in New York State. Most of the 2,254 inmates, like a majority of the U.S. prison population, were black or Hispanic, street-hardened products of city ghettos. The revolt, slowly fueled by harsh treatment inmates received inside Attica’s cold walls, could have come at any time, but the match that ignited it was the California killing of Black Panther leader George Jackson in what authorities claimed was an attempted prison escape.

 

When the violence erupted after breakfast and before work detail on a Thursday morning, inmates used shovels, bats and sheer numbers to take 38 hostages and possession of a large part of the prison.  In the dramatic days of face-to-face negotiating that followed, prison officials consented to nearly all inmates’ demands, but on Saturday a guard who had been injured in the first outbreak died. After that, neither Russell Oswald, New York’s Commissioner of Corrections, nor his boss, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, would yield to the prisoners’ demand for total amnesty. 

 

It rained the Monday morning of the state assault. It had been four sleepless days since my arrival at the prison, and I had worked my way inside Cell Block D. I was standing next to inmates and hostages alike. Twenty hours had passed and I was down to my last 15 rolls of film. Suddenly, the sound of helicopters shook the ground and a voice rang out over the prison PA telling the inmates to put down their weapons and set the hostages free. The prisoners didn’t respond.

 

Moments later a fine mist of CS gas rained down from the circling helicopters, filling the prison courtyard and making it difficult to see more that five or six feet in any direction. Then the shooting started. The horror in the eyes of inmates and hostages when state police snipers opened fire is still with me, locked in a psychic file that even I cannot delete. In all, 41 men were killed – nine of them hostages.

 

The image that I feel captures the sprit of Attica best is the image I made of the officer’s helmet. That one image sums up all the things that I saw and felt, the loss of life, the inmate’s frustrations, the inaction of the state. In taking pictures it is often important to find a way to make your images symbols that tell a larger story. The thing to keep in mind is that visual symbols are always simple, devoid of distracting elements. They are pictures that can be read from a distance. Think stop sign. Now go shoot some. You might not make truly symbolic images at first but the exercise of simplifying your pictures will make them stronger.

 

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A make shift tripod

MOONSET

For the past 20 years my wife, Marianne, and I have spent part of every summer on the Cape Cod.  For me the Cape has been a place to recharge my batteries, read summer mysteries and watch my children grow up. Making summer pictures has also been a big part of vacationing for me. As I have said, it’s all about light.  My summer ritual has been to wake before sunrise, my eyes still full of sleep— coffee in hand—and find that perfect spot for an early morning picture.

 Many summer mornings, however, I have gone out and waited and the wonderful early light never arrived. It might have been because of rain or too much fog. It might have been because, at that perfect moment, a cloud covered the sun or the moon. There is a Zen to sunrise shooting; it’s hard to know what to expect. And remember, being a weatherman is the only job in the nation where you can be wrong 50% of the time and still have a job. 

Provincetown, with its beautiful light, is a common destination for my camera. For 20 years a series of small cottages just outside of town that the locals call the flower houses were the subject of camera journeys. At sunset the light is often breathtaking but the little cottages lost their quiet, understated charm under a mask of cars and people milling about, beer in hand. No, these small houses had to be photographed at sunrise or earlier at moonset when the locals were tucked in their beds. For years I tried and failed to make the image that was in my head. For one reason or the other, the weather or the light conspired against me.

I use Nikon cameras and for the most part a tripod is a heavy piece of equipment that I often leave in the trunk of my car. As it happened that morning, I didn’t have my tripod. As my wife and I approached the flower houses we saw the moonset of a lifetime.  The moon was so large that it seemed to fill the western sky while from the east the sun rose like a phoenix from the sea. It was the image I’d been waiting 20 years to make and I didn’t have a tripod to steady my camera for the long exposure. With quick thinking on my wife’s part, she offered to let me use her shoulder as a make shift tripod and the result is the Moonset picture. Twenty years in the making.

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Chasing the light

Painted Badlands

The camera is a magic box that can hold your thoughts and memories

The second in my series of Moab Utah pictures is one that I’ve called Painted Badlands. My wife and I had traveled to Moab to attend a music festival. Our host was Michael Barrett and his wife, Leslie, both founders of The Moab Music Festival. This area of Utah is called Red Rock country. It’s an area of great beauty so different from the landscapes we see in the east. As I have said on this blog, it is all about chasing the light and that morning was made more special by a storm that was stirring some twenty miles to the west. With the early morning sun to my back, the foreground took on a warm hue that made the stormy western sky seem darker and all that more interesting. I exposed for the light areas in the foreground and, using a polarizing filter, I was able to control the density of sky.

Always remember no matter what kind of camera you use film or digital it’s all about the light.

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The Landscape

Park Avenue

I've always enjoyed landscape photography. I made this image on a recent trip to Moab Utah. The light in Utah is like a magnet to me, it pulls at something deep inside and acts as a guide, growing my understanding of the place and its people. In future posts I will share more of my images from the Moab trip and ways to make your landscape photography more effective. I will also have postings on my upcoming shows, as well as chapters from my new books.