In September of this year I visited Bill Jay, the pre-eminent photo-historian and critic, at his home in Ocean Beach, California. Jay, a scholarly Brit, and Ocean Beach, a sleepy Southern California surfer town, seemed like an oil and water combo. But as we walked through the brisk morning air to a downtown diner for breakfast, I realized that Jay had found an American version of the quaint seaside resorts so famous in his native England. Having retired from teaching, Jay was now on a permanent “working” vacation.
Jay was one of my professors at Arizona State University. His energy and enthusiasm for photography has not waned in the intervening 15 years, nor has his desire to write, edit and publish. Jay published his first article at the age of 19 in Practical Photography, which was, at the time, Europe’s largest circulating photography magazine. Over the course of his life, he has been the editor of two well-known journals (Creative Camera, from 1968-1969 and Album, during 1970), a contributing writer to numerous other publications and books, and has published 20 volumes of his own photography and anthologies of critical writing. Most of these books have been published with Chris Pichler of Nazraeli Press, another former student of Jay’s. [Visit BillJayOnPhotography.com for downloadable articles and a full bibliography.]
I had come to talk with Jay about his newest volume of photographs and writings, titled Bill Jay’s Album, Volume 1 (Nazraeli, 2007). Jay has had the privilege to meet some of the most famous photographers of his time. Jay has made snapshots of these encounters and notes that encapsulate each interaction. Bill Jay’s Album, Volume 1 collects 100 of these portraits and handwritten notes, to be followed next year by Volume 2. It includes everyone from Aaron Siskind and Nathan Lyons to Daido Moriyama and Burk Uzzle as well as contemporary luminaries like Joel-Peter Witkin, Alex Webb and Martin Parr. Jay's entries are riveting for their straight-shooting commentary or inspiring anecdotes.


The Interview:
Darius Himes: I'm curious as to how this project started. In the introduction you mention a story behind the death of Tony Ray Jones, who was a photographer and friend of yours. What happened?

Bill Jay: Let me tell you first how I met Tony Ray Jones. He had gone to America at a very young age where he studied with a few of the greats, like Alexey Brodovitch, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. At the time, I was editing Creative Camera, and in comes this guy with unruly red hair and a Fu Man Chu mustache. He just walked up and told me "Your magazine is shit, but I can see you are trying, so I have come to help." I thought, "You arrogant bastard!" But since he had a Kodak box full of prints, I told him to put his photographs where his mouth was. Looking at them, I thought, “Okay, this guy can really teach me something, and I'll include him in the magazine.”
He was quite an irascible and cantankerous chap, and happened to get leukemia at a young age. At the time, he was working as a still photographer on the set of Blackula, a blaxploitation film being produced in San Francisco. He couldn't afford to be treated in America so he came back to England. He arrived on a Friday night and I went to see him on Saturday. He was in very good spirits, saying now he could continue his "English by the Seaside" series of photographs. By the time I went back on Monday to see him again, he was dead.
I decided that I would make a memorial album of portraits. But the only photograph I could find was one of him with his finger up his nose! It was tragic and comic at the same time. So I said to myself, from now on I would photograph the photographers I meet, and make it a sort of visual diary.
It never has been an obsession. I wasn't like a butterfly collector who had to have every specimen. But nonetheless, there are still so many photographers I wish I had photographed: Diane Arbus, Eugene Smith, or Robert Frank. These are people I have spent a fair amount of time with but I never did [photograph them] for some reason or another. Now, if I could go back, I probably would be more forthright.

DH: How did you approach editing these volumes?

BJ: It was difficult. Should I include the most famous photographers, or those whose work I like, or those whom I know the best? A mixture of all those elements went into this. Is there anything interesting I want to say about them? That was another criterion. It is interesting how many people I left out of Vol. 1 that I now regret. I was editing up to the final minutes.

DH: The more I look at the book and go over your handwritten entries for each photographer, the more I hear your voice. I’m really drawn in to this feeling of family. It’s also great to see portraits of so many of the people I deeply admire.
Let’s talk for a minute about “family” and the sense of community in photography. For decades, the photography community seemed to be extremely small and tight-knit. Even when I entered the field, this feeling still existed; I could sense it at conferences and openings. Over the last 20 years or so though, there have been so many upheavals and transformations. Are we witnessing the end of an era?

BJ: This past summer, a British magazine did a profile of my photographic life in England (which ended really when I left in 1972). They quoted me as saying that “I was very disappointed not to be at the birth of photography but I am pleased that I was present at its end.” I don’t remember saying that, but now I want to write a piece about why I must have said it. I think the “end of photography” has been happening over the last 30 years. It is the end of the medium as an international fraternity of like-minded people who appreciate the unique characteristics of photography. There is a sense that there are no masters, no standards by which to judge the merit of a photograph. I am not disparaging that, but I think it is interesting. And I am saying that photography as a unique enterprise is over.

DH: When it comes to this question of a canon of masters, why has that shifted so much?

BJ: It's been in our rush to have photography accepted as a fine art. We’ve wanted “establishment” credibility. As a community, we gave up control and the determination of issues of merit that are uniquely photographic so very quickly to the gallery market and museum curators. In short, photographers are no longer in charge of the medium.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Thirty to 40 years ago you could ask: How does one become a recognized photographer? And the answer was that other photographers noticed you and talked about you to other photographers. The word spread and a reputation took some while to form amongst the photographic community. Critics and historians were also photographers, and photographers themselves were the arbiters of merit. Even John Szarkowski began as a photographer and was well-versed in what it took to make images. Very quickly with the rise of the art market, however, the arbiters of merit were no longer the photographers.
That is what I mean by the death of photography. Now, is that a good or a bad thing? On the whole I think that is a terrible thing! We no longer have discussions about “What is photography?” Any time there was an exhibition at the MoMA or any other major exhibition, all the photographers were talking about what this meant to the medium. There were energetic discussions by rank and file photographers. But we don’t talk about photography anymore. We talk about who is making money and what gallery do you want to be shown at? Who is rising and how quickly will they fall?

On Being A Young Photographer

DH: In your preface, you describe an experience that any young photographer would have nightmares about. You were just out of art school and had the chance to show your portfolio to David Hurn, the Magnum photographer. He summed up your work in one word: Boring. You talk about this event as a pivotal moment in your development.

BJ: After Hurn dismissed my seven years of photography in 15 seconds, I took the photographs away and thought about what he said, and decided he was right. So I went back to him and said, “Well, I am not going to be a major photographer, so what else can I do in photography?” He said, “You enjoy writing, you enjoy putting on exhibitions, you enjoy talking about photography. We don’t have people like that. Photographers are ten-a-penny but people like you are more rare.” And that’s about the time I got a hold of Creative Camera and worked as the editor of the publication for a number of years.

DH: In one of your essays, you ask young photographers to think about what they would be interested in if they didn’t have a camera in their hands. What other advice do you have for young photographers?

BJ: Well, you don’t learn anything about yourself from thinking or examining the way you are feeling. As Bernard Shaw says, “the quickest way to get sick is to wonder how you feel.” You need to use something outside yourself to focus on other things that then tell you about yourself. I don’t think photography is unique in that way.
I remember an interview with a famous violinist: the interviewer asked him what his average day was like. And the musician responded something like, “I get up in the morning and read about music. I go for a walk and think about composition. Then I practice all afternoon. I give a concert in the evening and then I hang out with my friends and play music ‘til late at night.” The interviewer says “Well, that seems to be a very narrow-minded life.” The musician replies, “It was at first, and then eventually I found I was getting more and more focused until I went through the hole in the hourglass and came out the other side and found that everything I was learning about music was applicable to everything else in life.”
I think I was very fortunate in discovering a way of objectifying self very early on. Everything about photography, everything I write about photography, everything I photograph has a feedback system which says: This is what it's like to be human. For example, I did a book about homeless men here in Ocean Beach. I sat and talked to them and photographed them, and discovered that they were in unfortunate circumstances but actually that we shared much more in common than we differed. I couldn’t possibly have understood that by reading or thinking about it.


EXCERPTS AND IMAGES FROM Bill Jay’s Album

Martin Parr
Martin Parr and I go way, way back to when he was a student at Manchester Polytechnic in 1970. I lectured at the school and Martin (here I blush) has often said that this event set him on the path to serious photography. That being as it may, there is no doubt that the student has far outstripped his teacher! I can think of no other photographer of stature working today who is as inventive, prolific, provocative or wide-ranging in his choice of projects.
So what makes his work “provocative?” Nurtured and inspired by “concerned photographers,” Martin rejected their classic formula of documenting social ills in a humanistic effort to ease hardship. His color images, usually with ring-flash, seem cynical if not downright aggressive in their emphasis on the tawdry and tacky in modern consumerism. They are also, often, very funny. His friend, the critic Gerry Badger, said it best: “If he has tended to focus upon the trivial, we must point the finger to the preponderance of the trivial in our society. If we dislike the mirror he has held to our aggressive, materialistic culture, that is perhaps our fault not his.” For a wonderful, early introduction to his unique take on the world see Home and Abroad, 1993, or the latest Fashion Magazine, 2005, although he is so prolific that the word “latest” will be redundant by the time these words are in front of your eyes.
The portrait of him I have chosen to publish occurred after I received his call: “Hi, I’m next door and thought I would visit.” By “next door” he meant Mexico and I was in southern California. I have no idea where someone like Martin finds his energy.

Jacques Henri Lartigue
Jacques Henri Lartigue was a child prodigy in photography, the only one of which I am aware. And he never grew up. I say that with a tinge of awe. Throughout his life, he retained an impish zest and childish delight in the senses, unimpaired by intellect, writing in his journal that he took pictures “as if I were trying to catch a smoke-ring in a butterfly net, and then my human ‘intellect’ persuades me that all is lost, annihilated, nothingness . . . Then, a little country bell rings, or a blackbird sings, a fragrance passes by – and all is resurrected.”
His best images were made before he was 16. During this time he made snapshots of his family life. Fortunately, the family saw its wealth as a source of inventive fun, reveling in discoveries, the latest gadgets and sporting activities. As Richard Avedon remarked: “Hundreds of children from the same social milieu received cameras, but they never became Lartigues.” It is interesting to ponder why? A dreary, even prosaic but compelling answer, is that Lartigue instinctively knew the difference between a record and a picture. In the latter, the elements within the picture area coalesce into a unified, satisfying arrangement of shapes.
I photographed him in 1971, before the opening of his exhibition at the new The
Photographers’ Gallery, London. Even at 77 years of age he still exuded a charming, youthful, joie de vivre and infectious sense of humor. When I told him a pair of rubber gloves were hanging over his head, he insisted: “Take a picture, perhaps they are the hands of God!”
One aspect of Lartigue’s work that became clear was his naive, sentimental and spiritual approach to life. I asked what advice he would give young photographers.
Without hesitation he listed a number of admonitions, including: eat the right foods (small quantities); appreciate good music; enjoy silences; sleep well; love God.

Alex Webb
Alex Webb had been recently nominated as a full member of Magnum Photos when I photographed him in the cooperative’s New York offices. He was quite a change from expectations. I knew many of the Magnum photographers as raucous egotists, like members of a large, loving, but dysfunctional family. Alex was quiet and contemplative, an intellectual, a graduate of Harvard University, in history and literature. I especially wanted to meet him in 1980 because he had recently started shooting in color, in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Africa.
These images were a revelation to me. Although rooted in the tradition of street photographer with which I was most familiar, they veered into a much more interpretive vision of the subject matter, a heightened exploration of hot color and black shadows which seemed to reflect some of the emotional rawness and vibrancy of tropical light. The images are delicately teetering between subjective reportage, objective documentation and personal art.
Since then, his images, unlike so many arising out of the photojournalistic tradition, really do look comfortable when matted and framed on the walls of a museum. To my mind, he was one of the most innovative and important young photographers of the 80s.

Daido Moriyama
Moriyama’s work poses an interesting dilemma: when does “bad” photography become transformed into “good,” even celebrated, photography? The answer seems to have a great deal to do with quantity as opposed to quality. His shoot-from-the-hip, randomly captured, grainy, disorganized, harsh images disregard every convention of craftsmanship, visual discipline and tight framing, to produce a welter of spontaneous impressions. According to a text accompanying his celebrated exhibition, Stray Dog, Moriyama’s “unique perspective on street life transforms the mundane into something captivating and rare.” I like that word “something.” I, too, would be hard-pressed to state what that something was. Having looked at his images in magazines and books, such as Memories of a Dog, 2004, as lecture slides and as original prints as well as talking to him, I can only presume that reputation is deserved – can so many curators and critics be wrong? – but that my own preferences are firmly stapled to a different band of the photo-spectrum.
In spite of the tone of the above words, I have a lot of respect for Daido Moriyama. It takes a good deal of courage to flout traditions and expectations. In this age of anything-goes pluralism his work, subversive as it is, provokes no controversy. But imagine what it was like to produce such anti-art in the early 1970s when photography in America was fast emerging and merging into fine art decor and beginning to be shown in chic galleries as unique works. In that age, Moriyama’s plethora of quick and disjointed snapshots was at the opposite end of the approved spectrum.
Daido Moriyama is “one of Japan’s most important contemporary artists, and has attracted an enormous international following,” said one commentator. And both those statements are true, but puzzling to an old fogey like me. He wanders this world shooting with apparent disregard for visual discrimination or logic, churning out a chaotic, disjointed string of (to my eyes) banal images. This is claimed to be an abrasive new wave of “subjective documentary” pioneered by Moriyama and other Japanese photographers in the early 1970s. He has certainly been consistent. For decades, Daido Moriyama has been producing books and exhibitions in which quantity trumps quality. This is an interesting idea – that photography’s spectacular facility in recording the flux of life obviates the need to “edit” it into singular pictures of traditional merit – but it is not one that stimulates the whole of me, just the little part that toys with photographic concepts. But I do have a grudging respect for Moriyama. He has been true to his faith and consistent in its application. Anyone who works as long and as diligently on a body of work, and is as thoughtful of its meaning and consequence, cannot be lightly dismissed.

Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark first came to my attention in a rather unusual way, quite a few years before she became a well-known photographer. In the late 1960s I was working at a picture agency looking for photographers to assign to movie sets. I received a tip that a talented young photographer was in town. I arranged to meet her in a London hotel and, confessing my chauvinism, at first did not recognize as a photographer the beautiful, elegant young lady who emerged from the elevator. I was more used to the scruffy-vested photojournalists of those years. But when I saw her images taken on the set of Federico Fellini’s movie Satyricon I was immediately impressed.
Her work began and continues to be firmly rooted in the traditions of social documentary photography, emphasizing a close affinity between the humanity of the photographer and the plight of the subjects. She brings the same empathy to her lectures and photographic workshops. I saw this first hand when we were attending the same workshop in California in April 1983. The portrait was taken during this week. The students loved her. She was gentle in her criticism, firm in her principles and inspiring in her encouragement.