Underground Photography

June 21st, 2023

In 1991, I auditioned for LaGuardia Music and Art High School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, right down the block from Juilliard, and behind Lincoln Center. In the 1980’s there was a TV series and a movie called, “Fame” which was about the students of the school. It was a different building in Midtown, but I thought it was a good representation of teenage native New Yorkers.

So I auditioned for both the music and the art departments at LaGuardia and was accepted into both. For the music audition I played piano. A few pieces I had learned from studying at Turtle Bay Music School, along with songs my father taught me, including a simple medley I made up which combined Korsakov’s Scheherazade with Led Zepplin’s Stairway to Heaven. For the art department audition, I brought in a portfolio of different mediums - painting, sketches, charcoal. I was accepted into both programs but I had to choose one. I chose art. And that sent me on the trajectory of darkroom photography - specifically black and white 35mm film.

As soon as I learned the skill of shooting film and darkroom photography, I took my camera downtown to the Village - Greenwich Village, the East Village, Alphabet City, the Lower East Side. I found a world of artists, musicians, writers, political activists, teenage runaways, squatters, and punks. I loved photographing them. Just being in that atmosphere introduced me to so many colorful locals. It seemed I was entering a time capsule - the 50’s beatnik, 60’s rocknroll, 70’s punk, and the 90’s grunge eras all frozen in time at once. Even when I visit there today, with all the changes, I can still find some of the same characters roaming the streets and they look exactly the same. Frozen in time.

It was a fascinating world because they all really seemed to follow their own rules there. This is what I was attracted to. Fifteen years ago, I published a photography book of some of these unique souls. I wrote something then that I still believe today. This is what I wrote: “People who in some way go against the grain make the most interesting subjects to shoot. They are at once vulnerable and brave because they’re always exposed in their communities as outsiders and yet have the courage to push forward with their beliefs despite societal, cultural, political, religious, or familial pressures. They are what is beautiful and unique about life. They are rich, soulful, and often misunderstood people who stretch the perimeters of acceptance and pave the way for future generations to potentially create a new norm.”

And a few years after high school I started to work in SoHo for a commercial photographer who became a sort of mentor for me. Her name was Sandi Fellman, and although I didn’t follow in her footsteps as I was not particularly interested in commercial photography or studio shoots, she made beautiful work and I learned so much from her. She had the most magnificent and impressive body of work shooting members of the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia and a very very secret society. She had an inside look into their world and photographed their full body tattoos. Absolutely gorgeous. She asked me to bring in my portfolio of black and white prints. It was she who first told me that my work resembled the photography of Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin. Prior to that I actually wouldn’t look at other photographers works. I refused to. I was quite vehement about not wanting to be influenced by other artists. I wanted everything to come from inside me to make sure the expression of it was real and pure, something authentically me.

I remember years later I went to an art therapist and she taught me that every work of art is a self-portrait. And I took that to mean that no matter if it is a painting, a drawing, a piece of music, performance art, a poem, or a photograph, there will always be a part of the artist’s subconscious exposed in everything they create. That’s why I really didn’t want to be influenced, but Sandi insisted that I look at Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin. I resonated with both. I especially fell in love with Diane Arbus, and it turned out she had the same birthday as me, was raised uptown in Manhattan like I was, and we clearly had similar interests in regards to who we love to photograph, and the way we approached our subjects on a personal level. Sandi was also the one who put me into the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street, and then into ICP (The International Center of Photography) when it was still in the old Willard Straight House mansion across the street from Central Park on Fifth Avenue and 94th Street. There I was Teacher Assistant for dark room photography students and took additional classes. Her guidance absolutely pushed me forward to the next level, to take my passion into a profession.

I had already been photographing musicians since I was a teenager - shooting live shows and behind the scenes backstage at local clubs - mostly women in rock and roll. And now I started charging to shoot musician album covers, photos for websites and magazines - musicians, actors, models, performance artists. My friend Tara from LaGuardia who was now living on the Lower East Side had studied web design and coding which is what you needed back then in order to create a website for your business. It wasn’t as automatic and intuitive as it is today. She created the perfect website for me. In those days I called it RocknRoll Photography and it later became Underground Photography.

I was wheat-pasting large prints of my photographs onto the sides of buildings and billboards all over the East Village, so I essentially created an open air gallery exhibition - it became part gallery exhibit and part advertisement for my new website. I put my website address on the bottom of these images. And I made up business cards and I made up flyers. All very grassroots. Very 90s. But really at the end of the day my work came from word of mouth.

I was so immersed in the scene downtown and meeting new people all the time, it was very flowing for years. I was shooting very interesting and cool people - many of whom became friends. I started showing my work in local galleries. I had my first real gallery show at CB’s Gallery, which was connected to the legendary CBGB Club. It was a gallery/live music space next door to CBGB. My photographs were included in several exhibitions at local galleries and various other venues. It was important to me to support artist-owned places or local art festivals or just local venues. I was most interested in building community rather than anything else.

And although portraits were the most gratifying subjects for me to shoot I also loved to photograph the movement of performance. And not only shooting live bands, but also the performance art of burlesque dancing. That was really exciting as well. It was amazing to play with the light in these moving shots. I didn’t like using flash on my camera so I got some really interesting images from these shoots. To me, it was all very poetic. They looked almost like a painting, and became one-of-a-kind moments that can’t really be replicated. In the early 2000s, the old Vaudeville days of burlesque performance was making a comeback.

Around this time I also started shooting video and became more interested in expanding - taking my still images into the moving image. So I went back to school with a major in film and TV and a minor in music. This took me on my path towards television and making movies.

Here is my Time Capsule called “Underground Photography” -