"Garry Winogrand Shot My Father"

Article that I wrote,  which was published in the Swiss magazine Aufbau, June 2012.

GARRY WINOGRAND SHOT MY FATHER & I SHOT BACK

  

In 1955 my 21-year-old father was taken to the legendary New York nightclub El Morocco by his millionaire uncle.  While they were clustered around one of the iconic zebra striped banquettes a performer completed  a dramatic pratfall, landing face first right at their feet while balancing a cocktail on his head.  Although some of the jaded regulars were surely amused , my uninitiated father was utterly transfixed.  And just at that very moment, a young  Turk photographer named Garry Winogrand snapped the scene.   Looking back, one can be sure Winogrand had little inkling that he would one day be canonized by the medium he had only recently embraced.  It is equally probable that my young father could not have supposed that his future son would not only himself become a photographer but also one who would be profoundly influenced by that man with the camera.

More than half a century after my father was immortalized by Winogrand and in anticipation of next year’s retrospective of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, I pause to consider this influential artist.  He is certainly important within the history of photography, but for me he is also important in defining my own history, and even pre-history if I look back at that serendipitous moment in 1955.  My own career has focused on capturing  the romp of the rich and famous through New York nightlife, and I like to think that my father’s brush with Winogrand somehow rubbed off and onto my own DNA.

As much as I love the chic photograph  capturing my young father transfixed by the metaphor of a surprising future,  it was not until the photographer explored the full potential of the New York street during the 1960’s  that  he became a fully formed artist.  Moving from pictures of performers and daily life shot for publications, to personal images on the street, the artist’s vision shifted from being  slightly romantic and humorous to images full of  stylistic discombobulation and emotional irony.    This new vision was ideal to explore the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis and was why celebrated curator John Szarkowski called Winogrand  the central photographer of his generation.

Although he would make pictures at various locales including zoos, airports, and parties, on the city street is where he was most famously able to utilize and explore unconventional perspectives vis-à-vis the 35mm Leica camera and the wide angle lens.   It is this body of work that made Winogrand synonymous with the title “Street Photographer.”   He extended a tradition fixed by the French photographers,  Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson, by integrating the surrealistic aesthetic of those photographers with a new idiom of pictorial space inherent in the radical forms found in mid-century life as well as art.    Influenced by Robert Frank’s book The Americans,  released in the U.S. in 1959, Winogrand pushed the envelope by exploring  the physicality of the photographic act.  When he was working on the street,  his camera became a direct extension of both his body in motion and the momentary dramas that would be moving towards him.    While making pictures in this manner,  horizon lines, perspective, and figures all appeared and disintegrated in a way never before captured.   At times, the action of taking pictures is as much the subject as any dramatic element before the lens.   Winogrand himself famously said “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”  

John Szarkowski , former Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art,  highlighted the importance of  Winogrand’s work in a seminal 1967 exhibit titled “New Documents”.  The show also included two other photographers that helped define post-WWII America, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander.  These artists made pictures that  moved photographic representation away from the lyrical into new ways of seeing that were more in keeping with the volatile times of the 1960’s.

It is interesting to note that all three photographers, like myself,  were of Eastern European  Jewish descent.   Working in the wake of a war that confiscated the freedom of the street and the revelry of  everyday experience, these artists recovered what European Jews tragically lost.    Winogrand  himself was even quoted as saying half jokingly that all the best photographers were Jewish.  In his assessment he intimated that  perhaps even Atget was of the faith but he must also have been thinking of his hero the Swiss Jewish photographer Robert Frank.   

The exhibition opening next March at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be Winogrand’s first retrospective in 25 years.   For this newest appraisal that considers Winogrand’s finished & unfinished work as well as some under-edited earlier film, the SFMoMA has engaged photographer Leo Rubinfien to curate the exhibition.  Of special note is an up until now unseen  cache of images from the 1960 Democratic National Convention  that  Rubinfien has discovered.   From this historical shoot, only one image from the more than 5,000 exposures is known to have ever been previously printed or published. 

Learning of Winogrand’s exploration into the social space of politics at the 1960 Democratic National Convention,  I was reminded of my own foray into the political arena, photographing both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for George Magazine in 1996.   Like Winogrand in 1960, I was enthusiastic, hungry, and ambitious but still relatively optimistic about politics.  It was Bill Clinton’s reelection year and he was my John F. Kennedy.  In fact, JFK Jr. was my editor-in-chief  at George.  On the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,  I remember a loud pop going off.  I turned and saw several offspring of Robert F. Kennedy wince briefly in shock.  For a split second,  I was sent back to the time immediately following the jubilant 1960 election,  an era of disbelief marked by assassinations and paranoia.   My own world would shift irrevocably after the start of the new millennium.   But back at the conventions of 1960 and 1998, both Winogrand and  I still viewed the political process as open and full of potential. 

In the aftermath of the 1960 Democratic National Convention,  Winogrand’s optimism would wane.    The photographer stated in his 1963 Guggenheim grant application “Our Aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty.  I read the newspapers, the columnists,  some books, I look at the magazines (our press).  They all deal in illusions and fantasies.  I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life. “  This pessimism, one that I currently share, was in part his reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 .  He was able, however, to channel this anger into creating his most accomplished imagery shot in the 1960’s and through the 70’s.  

In 1978,  Winogrand moved to Los Angeles,  where his shooting became manic in quantity and quality.    Whether as an artist he was burnt out or trying to develop a new vision, this ongoing assessment of his late work will be part of Rubinfien’s task  in next year’s retrospective at SFMoMA.   For me,  Winogrand’s  later years are the conclusion of an artistic  trajectory that brought him from being  the romantic young man shooting at El Morocco,  to  the unique ironist helping to define his generation, to ending up a desperate nihilist unable to focus his vision.  Shooting without editing or even developing the film, at the end, his talent became a beautiful impulse completely out of control. 

As a photographer following in  the footsteps of Garry Winogrand, my own images have been influenced  by  his  keen sense of irony as well as his sophisticated manipulations of  the picture plane.   I have integrated into my own work his most radical visual invention, tilting the horizon line, and hopefully made it my own.  Truth be told,  Winogrand was the master of this revolution , a brilliant perversion that intuitively captured the chaos of a new American era. 

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Miles Ladin is a photographer born, raised, and working in New York City.  For 20 years he has shot nightlife and people of privilege for publications including The New York Times and W Magazine.  In 1996 he photographed the American presidential race for  two features written by Norman Mailer and published in George Magazine.  In 2009 his work was displayed in a solo exhibition at Miami’s Wolfsonian Museum.  

Boris Lurie and his Battle Cry of NO!

published in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of Aufbau magazine

"No" as an Answer

Boris Lurie survived the Riga ghetto and four German concentration camps. These experiences became the basis of a radical artistic examination of consumer culture and the art market. 

by Miles Ladin

There is a well-known story about the first-time John Lennon met Yoko Ono. In the fall of 1966, Ono had an exhibition at the Indica gallery in London titled, Unfinished Paintings and Objects. Lennon, entered the gallery and encountered a ladder leading up to a piece of paper stuck to the ceiling. When the Beatle walked up the ladder to read the piece of paper he was greeted by the word YES. The joyful optimism expressed through the work titled Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting, was enough to spark intense curiosity about its maker, Ono. The rest is history and Lennon often recounted this important moment.  In a 1971 Rolling Stoneinterview, Lennon explained “I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes.'”

At the same time in New York City, another artist by the name of Boris Lurie not only relished the word “no” but in fact used it as a de facto “fuck you” by adding an exclamation point and extending the English lexicon to include NO! For Lurie, NO! was his visual imperative, his life view, and from 1959 the name of the art movement he founded with fellow artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher. Although one could easily discount the word no, as John Lennon had, as being a word of cynicism and nihilism, for Lurie it became a radical battle cry to save humanity from itself as well as an artistic call to action.

The conceptual art of Yoko Ono stands in stark contrast to that of the lesser known Boris Lurie. Her body of work is often spoken about in relation to Zen Buddhism.  She lived through the WWII bombing of Tokyo and along with her late husband John Lennon is a fierce advocate for a simplistic (if appealing) dream of world peace.  Boris Lurie also survived WWII but his life experience and the message he chose to channel through his art was radically different. 

Born in 1924 to a Jewish family in Leningrad, Lurie was interned in four different concentration camps during WWII. By the time the Allies liberated him in 1945 from a Buchenwald satellite camp, his mother, grandmother, sister, and childhood sweetheart had all been shot at the Rumbula Massacre. In 1946, Lurie emigrated with his father from Germany to New York City where from memory he documented the horror of his wartime experience into powerful drawings and paintings. 

The memory works of war were soon joined by dedicated images of women that moved towards a more modernist aesthetic. Now in his early 20s and experiencing the freedom of New York City, Lurie was able to explore his feelings towards women and sexuality outside of the camps. At the same time, he was still grieving over the female members of his family who were murdered.  This complex association with the female gender eventually produced pictures where the female body is segmented, creating works that contain both beauty and horror. It is with these pictures developed in the mid-1950s that Lurie starts to find his unique voice. 

While dedicating himself to his art, Lurie socialized with other artists and became aware of the growing market value towards new art, specifically abstract expressionism. In 1958, with Jasper Johns’ solo exhibition at the trendy new Leo Castelli gallery, pop art became a hot commodity that celebrated popular culture with an ironic joie de vivre sensibility.  Lurie, who was still reeling from his war time experience, found these incarnations of new art to be not only hollow but an insult towards the reality that he and other European Jews had recently endured.  

His indignation towards the art world ignited his growing disgust towards American consumerism and the trappings of post-war capitalism. This was the catalyst for both a more critical approach in Lurie’s art as well as the anti-establishment art movement of which he was a co-founder. The NO! art moment developed from a group of like-minded artists who exhibited at the cooperative March Gallery located on New York’s 10^thstreet. After Theodor Adorno’s famous 1949 pronouncement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” these artists decided to make a commitment to an art that confronted the atrocities of the recent past rather than ignoring them.  They positioned themselves against the more palatable art movements of the day, which they considered decadent and consciously stayed outside the prevailing art world. 

Lurie’s creative response to pop art was to turn that idiom on its head. The artist co-opted pop art and created paintings using the motif of magazine pin-up girls. Rather than a celebration of sexuality, these works critiqued the commodification of sex and were often emblazoned with the word NO.  In the early 1960s, Lurie extended this body of work by combining the pin-ups with images portraying victims of concentration camps after the liberation.  Both dead and alive, the juxtaposition between the victims of genocide and the objectified subjects of pornography are extremely jarring.  

Other works that are equally confrontational include, Immigrant’s NO Suitcase (Anti-Pop), 1963. Painted on a suitcase typical of those clutched by Jews forced from the ghettos and onto cattle cars by the Nazis, Lurie has transformed this iconic object with color, slogans, pinups, and a swastika. The viewer is made to engage with these visual signifiers on various levels at a time when the culture at large was trying to forget the six million dead. Lurie’s work can still be difficult to contemporary viewers. In 2009 at the ArtHamptons fair another work combining pin-ups with a swastika titled Lumumba is Dead (Adieu Amérique)from 1961garnered a complaint and was ultimately censored from the exhibition.

Incredibly, Lurie’s powerful oeuvre was not limited to the visual arts. The artist wrote a novel, the House of Anita, that was never published in his lifetime. The book is semi-autobiographical and deals with the traumas that Lurie suffered during WWII. As a metaphor for man’s degradation towards man, the novel integrates sexual sadomasochism into the disturbing narrative. The novel is available in English, Russian, and will soon be printed in German. Lurie’s memoir of his early days in Riga is also available but awaits the publication of two additional volumes of his later memoirs. There are also essays and poems that faithfully extend his anti-establishment NO! beyond the visual. 

Throughout their period of active production, both Lurie and the NO! art movement willfully put themselves outside of the art world and away from the commodification of art. Lurie was brazen in his disdain to the extent that in 1970 published an indictment of the famed ivory tower of modern art titled MoMA as Manipulator.  As an artist, myself, it is easy to understand Lurie’s frustration. From its inception, the Museum of Modern Art was myopic and white male dominated in regards to its power structure and its collection. The museum has just reopened after a major renovation and is finally making an admirable commitment towards diversity within their permanent collection displays.  As much as the established canon of modern art can be viewed as dogma the latest push for political correctness in and outside of MoMA, certainly risks its own curatorial pitfalls. Still as Lurie must have known, an artist who bites the hand that feeds, puts the long-term viability of their work at risk.

Luckily for Lurie, he and his father were always able to attract wealth starting in Latvia then after the liberation in Germany and finally in New York City.  By the time of his death in 2008, Lurie managed to amass a fortune in real estate and other investments. With little reputation towards his large artistic output, a self-sustaining foundation was formed to promote his unique vision.  Since the foundation’s inception, Lurie’s work has been ambitiously exhibited at international venues including in Cuba, Israel, Italy, Germany, Latvia, Poland, and the US.  

Besides the promotion of Lurie’s work and the dissemination of his message, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation has also lent support to exhibitions focused on the NO! Art movement whose more than a dozen participants included Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama, and Aldo Tambellini. The foundation is also involved with charitable initiatives that include providing aid to Israeli soldiers and holocaust victims in need of wheelchairs and medical rehabilitation. The foundation has also funded two art libraries in Israel at the Dada Janco Museum and at the Tel Aviv Museum. These new repositories of learning will ensure that the message of Lurie and NO! Art will be remembered by future generations. 

Currently on view at Moscow’s Museum of Modern Art is a retrospective for the very well established Yoko Ono. This exhibition features her famous 1966 Ceiling Painting/Yes Paintingthat perhaps was the original catalyst for the Lennon/Ono peacenik lyric “all we are saying is give peace a chance”.   At the same time and around the corner at the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, Boris Lurie’s battle cry of NO! will be viewed by an audience mostly unfamiliar with the under-recognized artist. In his retrospective, ALTERED MAN: The Art of Boris Lurie, the people of Ukraine will get the opportunity to consider an important artist who loudly confronted the fascism, hypocrisy, and horror that he and many others experienced in the 20^thcentury. 

Boris Lurie current exhibitions:

November 15 – December 15, Altered Man: The Art of Boris Lurie, Odessa Fine Arts Museum, Odessa, Ukraine

January 23 - April 26, 2020. REDISCOVERING BORIS LURIE (1924–2008): The Artist who dared to say ‘No!’ , Center for Contemporary Political Art, Washington DC

June 25 - October 14, 2020,Boris Lurie Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile

(collaborating with the archives of the Museo de la Memoria, Santiago, Chile)

July 7 - Sept. 13, 2020, Boris Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, Russia 

September 3, 2020 - October 29, 2020, Boris Lurie Retrospective, MUSEO BORGES, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Yoko Ono current exhibitions:

until November 24^thYoko Ono: The Sky is Always Clear, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art 

until December 31, YOKO ONO: INTERVENTIONS/2 at The Georgian House Museum, part of The Bristol Museum group 

Foto-Gestalt 2019

published in the February/March 2019 issue of Aufbau magazine

Medium in Crisis: Narcissus in the Pond

At the age of 17, photography provided me with a license to actively engage with the world in a revelatory manner previously unknown to me.  I was taking a summer course with noted photographer Larry Fink in Martha’s Vineyard and hungrily ate up every pronouncement explicated from this charismatic beatnik.  According to Fink, the medium was about experience and empathy, not about passive voyeurism. It was not about being a hunter and souvenir gatherer, but about the exchange and interplay between photographer and subject. The camera was a tool for learning and self-knowledge, however the photographs, once exposed, might result in more questions than answers. The camera’s revelatory power was that it could be used for discovery rather than the facile and propagandistic purpose of proving a point. From the photographic adventure, there was the possibility of bringing back something others might appreciate, but that was a bit beside the point. This philosophy was a paradigm shift that transformed the way I considered the art making process and put me on my life’s path. 

The almost spiritual nature of the medium’s potential as explained to me on that New England island in 1985 still seduces me and engages my picture making today. The years that followed, however, have radically changed the way that photography operates in the world. The journey that I have personally taken from student to practitioner to teacher has been colored by radical developments in both the culture and the technology of the medium.  The Digital Age has brought both wondrous benefits as well as disappointing transgressions to the art form, as well as to my personal practice. The idealistic vision of photography touted to me in my youth can still be found in the work of some contemporary artists, but overwhelmingly, the mainstream culture has moved away from this humanistic impulse and taken the medium into the void of narcissism.

Digital technology has been wondrous in the resulting democratization of the photographic medium.  Not only do more individuals have access to the art form of photography, but mobile cameras are now being used as a simple and useful tool by large numbers of the population. Like any man-made tool, however, its use depends on its user. Just like the pen, a shopping list, love poem, or declaration of war are all options. Commonplace in our current day-to-day experience of photography is the pervasive selfie. On the street, on the subway, in the elevator, I notice this impulse everywhere. A child of social media, the selfie can be seen as Narcissus not only looking at his reflection, but falling into the pool. Related to this repetitive capturing of the self is the monotonous recording of things and moments. Rather than heightening an experience and using the camera as a tool to go deeper, this activity usually appears to be performed as a stand-in for actual experience. Thinking more about the posting and bragging, the present moment is lost and the trophy is hollow. Food, concerts, clothes, and travel are all fodder for the self-reflexive posting obsessed.  

This past New Year’s Eve, for example, I found myself on a NYC rooftop with friends and strangers. Rain and fog skewered the midnight fireworks display. But despite this, the revelers that surrounded me held up their mobile devices to desperately try and document the barely visible light show located beyond a tall building that further blocked its full recognition. Behind me in the dark, two 30-somethings preened in various poses taking selfies to prove they were there. Holding up a panda umbrella at various angles and then a Champagne glass, smiles were mandatory.  

The selfie has become a bragging rite that often showcases the aspiration or attainment of fame or wealth. This mode of photography is quite different from the casual family snapshots or hobbyist photography prevalent decades ago with film photography. The snapshot modality for the most part was bearing witness with a certain casual intimacy. The selfie more often than not reflects vanity at a level never before captured in the visual culture. This type of photography is certainly a very far cry from the Socratic impulse still espoused by Larry Fink, a professor at Bard College. When I myself recently taught photography, I had to work against the students’ assumption that a selfie reflects the goal of portraiture. When teaching studio lighting, students initially camped the same preening poses used for the typical toothy selfies. My goal in teaching portraiture is to lead the students of today towards an appreciation that a true portrait goes beyond the superficial vanity and disposable value of the selfie.  

The monolithic intrusion of social media selfies upon the way we function and perceive reality is a result of a 20-year journey through a digital revolution. In 1991, I entered an MFA program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. The then recently-launched graduate program in Photography and Related Media was founded by Charles Traub, who had the foresight to make digital photography a signature focus. As an educator, Traub was ahead of the curve; the programs at Yale and RISD were at that point still solely film based. Photoshop had only just been released in 1990 and I was part of the first generation to take a course on the software. After the class, however, I promptly rejected digital. Unlike some of my fellow students, who used the floppy disk based Sony Mavica cameras as well as Photoshop, I was decidedly Luddite. At least for the moment.

A decade later, in 2000, I found myself drawn back to Photoshop when producing the first of three limited edition artist’s books, in which I converted film negatives in order to output the images as digital pigment prints. I was using the technology to control the means of production and distribution.  I found that the technology actually gave me more control of image manipulation and printing quality than I had experienced in the traditional darkroom. In addition, I could use beautiful fine art paper for my images, which was not an option in traditional photography.  

I was still shooting film, however, and it wasn’t until 2004 that I started experimenting with my first digital DSLR camera.  I found the results lackluster, though, and continued to use film. Since starting assignment work for The New York Timesin 1992, my editorial work was focused on capturing famous individuals at A-list events. This work crosses the line between the commercial and fine-art spheres. It was due to this particular sensibility that editors still allowed me to shoot film well into the millennium, when most other photographers were shooting digitally. In fact, I was able to shoot film for my multi-page features of New York Fashion Week for Women’s Wear Daily’sprinted magazine The Collectionsthrough 2010.  

By then however, it was clear from the publishing landscape that I would need to shift if I wanted to stay viable as an editorial photographer. So I pitched my editor at WWDa digital version of my coverage. I would shoot digitally (using a new mirrorless camera that suited my needs) and upload multiple posts throughout fashion week while including a first person written account of my observations. He loved the idea and confided that my pitch was prescient, as the printed magazine was folding and everythingwas now to be online. 

Although this arrangement was highly successful and resulted in eight more seasons of work, it was for me the end of an era. I had come of age in a time when print magazines hired photographers to create dynamic visuals in a variety of styles. The publications could be superficial for sure, but they could also be highly engaging. W Magazinehad hired me for two years in the 1990s to create a series of pictorials satirizing the rich & famous. This was pretty subversive stuff from a publication that otherwise fawned on socialites and wealth. In 1996, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s magazine George, commissioned me to photograph President Bill Clinton’s run for his second term as President. The writer was Norman Mailer. The publication hired us even though neither of us were traditional political journalists. Other publications such as the New York Times Magazinecould be equally as progressive. Larry Fink recently referred to those days as a golden age for photographers, and I agree.

Although the 1990s provided stellar opportunities for subversives such as Fink and myself, the importance that publications held in the culture had actually been in steep decline for decades. The picture magazine had actually reached its zenith in the mid-20^thcentury. At that time publications such as Look, Life, and Harper’s Bazaarwere on the cutting edge of showcasing creative photography. In 1940, when fascism was taking hold of Europe, PM Weeklypublished a series of photographs depicting decadent bourgeoisie lounging in Nice, France. This seminal body of work was shot by Fink’s mentor, Austrian emigre Lisette Model. Later that decade, Lifemagazine published an eye-opening picture essay by Gordon Parks depicting a Harlem gang leader. The pictorials that were showcased in picture magazines brought a world on the brink into people’s living rooms. By the mid 1960’s television was bringing nightly coverage of the Vietnam War into people’s homes and the picture magazine became obsolete. In 1978, Life magazine went from a weekly to a monthly and currently only remains in special editions often dedicated to dead celebrities. 

The current celebrity-focused incarnation of this once legendary photojournalistic news magazine should, in another way, come as no surprise. From at least the 1950s through the digital era of today, fame seems to have grown exponentially as a cultural obsession. In the 1990s as digital photography was developing, so was a cultural construct of reality as captured for television. MTV’s Real World series launched in 1992 and ignited a society that not only watches The Kardashians, but wants desperately to have the same kind of fame that this family achieved through the weekly broadcasting of their vacuous reality. We need only look at the current American President to see the end game of our current obsession with fame and its depiction.

For me to lambast the current state of celebrity culture might seem a bit hypocritical. After all, I’ve made a career and an artistic body of work based on this phenomenon.  The fact, however, is that I made the pictures as a form of social commentary. My ambition has always been to try and elevate society by holding a mirror up to its decadent excesses. At the present moment, the opportunity to make such pictures for public consumption have all but disappeared. Those with fame exerted their growing power and insisted on release forms and other methods of control. Publications and journalists for the most part acquiesced. Editors in turn seem to want images that are easily digested by their audience. Flattering, toothy, front and center shots of the celebrity that are the equivalent in psychological depth to any selfie found on Instagram.  

Although today I rarely see images that interest or provoke me in mainstream publications, I often see pictures on social media that certainly cross the line. When studying with Larry Fink, it was explained that while we photographers were in fact invading someone else’s personal space with our cameras, if we were committed to utilize the art form for a higher purpose we could transcend any possible transgression. Although I can’t quite recall any conversations about respect for the subject and decorum, I feel like that would have been an obvious if unspoken expectation. Not so anymore, it seems. A few years ago, I noticed on Facebook a rather disturbing post by an acquaintance. She had used her phone to photograph an Amish couple who were sleeping on an Amtrak train. The image had no pathos but showed them, disheveled, mouths open and unaware. The litany of comments on the post were both for and against this particular documentation of reality. The acquaintance freely admitted to knowing full well that the Amish, as a rule, do not allow themselves to be photographed. Despite this she felt it was her right to lean behind her seat and take the picture. I found her way of thinking problematic at best and certainly a sign of the times. 

The medium at this moment is multi-faceted for sure and, as always, in flux. As a society we are still looking to balance the freedom of expression with the right for privacy. I still believe photography is an immensely powerful tool for Socratic investigation. Along those lines there is still some wonderful work being made by important voices. In 2010, Rosalind Solomon along with 11 other internationally acclaimed photographers, spent time making pictures in Israel and the West Bank for a project entitled This Place. Solomon spent 5 months photographing many individuals in many locations and of all faiths. Carrying her trusted Hasselblad camera on this new adventure, she “saw and felt…informed by the unexpected.” The resulting images published in her 2014 monograph THEM, tap into the psyche of her subjects. This octogenarian, who is another former student of Lisette Model, still to this day shoots her work in film. Larry Fink on the other hand, has gone digital. Acclaimed for his square medium format flash-infused dramatically lit images, he has put his flash away and embraced the incredible light sensitivity of the recent generation of digital camera sensors. Photography is dead…long live photography.  

Ascalon Design Family by Miles Ladin ……………. published in the Swiss Magazine, Aufbau

Three Generations of Industrial Designers

Bridge Their Vision From Art Deco to The Contemporary

This past January,  New York’s Lincoln Square Synagogue transferred their sacred scrolls of the Torah from their old Amsterdam Avenue location, one block south into the city’s  first newly built synagogue in fifty years.  The scrolls now sit in not just any ark, but one  designed by a family design team whose elevated vision connects  the modern Israeli decorative arts movement of the 1930’s with contemporary aesthetics.

Ascalon Studios has taken advantage of three generations of visionaries to create a remarkably  meditative focus within the main sanctuary.   Modern and light with blond wood  and a full bank of windows, the room avoids visual representation with the important exception of the Ascalon’s bronze ark doors.   The doors as well as the actual ark structure were conceived and created by David Ascalon and his two sons Eric and Brad.  A bronze sculpted olive tree adorns the doors and harkens back to  the Ascalon family patriarch, Maurice Ascalon whose bronze menorahs of the late 1940’s popularized the olive branch motif in the decorative arts of Israel. 

This is not, however, Maurice’s first time around the block waiving an olive branch at the citizens of New York.  Nearly 75 years ago,   at the age of 26, Maurice created a monumental relief sculpture that adorned the façade of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.  Titled “The Scholar, The Laborer, and The Toiler of the Soil”, this copper repoussé work comprised of three figures measuring 14 feet high.   It was also a monumental moment, as the pavilion and sculpture introduced Americans to the burgeoning modern Jewish state, a decade before the official state of Israel would come into existence. 

This impressive sculpture, which now resides in Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, symbolizes the Promised Land while combining the traditions of archaic art with the stylization of the Art Deco movement.  Ascalon first experienced the  Art Deco aesthetic while studying art in Western Europe.   Growing up in a Hungarian shtetl where his early artistic aspirations were shunned by the  ultra-religious Chasidic culture, Maurice decided to leave  home at the early age of 15.  He ended up studying  at the prestigious Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels before heading to Milan.  There he partnered with  Giovanni Rosa and  designed some of the early mannequins for La Rosa Mannequins, a company  well known for creating  sophisticated figures for couture designers.  In 1934 Maurice decide to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine, where on a recent visit he had met his wife and would start his family.  This decision was extremely prescient; Mussolini would enact the Italian Racial Laws in 1938 and many of Ascalon’s relatives living on the continent would not survive the impending Holocaust.

In Tel Aviv, Maurice realized his desire to create decorative metalwork for the masses and founded the Pal-Bell Company. Their wares included  bowls, pitchers, vases, and ashtrays as well as  menorahs and other Judaica.   Purchased by  locals and tourists, the objects were also exported to well known department stores in Europe and the US.  According to seasoned Judaica collector Aviram Paz, the  designs Ascalon produced for his  Pal-Bell company earn him the esteemed title of “father of modern Judaica Art Deco”   At  times the styling looked towards European decorative artisans such as René Lalique but the brass and bronze utilitarian objects also convey a unique aesthetic, perhaps  reflecting the new found freedom of the Promised Land.   

Their most well known design that showcased this aesthetic was their 1948 “oil lamp” menorah decorated with twin olive leaf branches,  the symbol for the new state of Israel.   One of these iconic menorahs resides in the permanent collection of New York’s Jewish Museum.   Another hallmark of the  company, came about when Ascalon developed a chemical process to mimic the green patina that art objects traditionally only achieve with age.    Through Ascalon’s experimentation and application,  this chemically induced look known as “verdigris”, became an important stylistic look in the modern Israeli decorative arts movement.   Both the olive branch motif and the “verdigris” look were soon adopted by rival designers with varying degrees of success.

After spending two decades in Israel producing his designs as well as participating in the Israeli War effort by having his factory  both design and produce munitions,  Maurice decided to emigrate with his family to the United states in 1956.  In the next two decades, while in New York and Los Angeles, Maurice became a master silversmith creating Torah crowns and other objects for synagogues.

He also spent these years passing down his knowledge to university students as well as his own children.  His son Adir was a well respected surrealist painter and sculptor who collaborated with the famed Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.  But it was Maurice’s son David who chose to follow in his footsteps,  creating sculpture, mosaics, and stained glass for houses of worship and other public institutions.   The stained glass, that David has been producing since he partnered with his father in the founding of Ascalon Studios in 1977, are modern and for the most part abstract.  These designs often accentuate the spiritual by creating  especially  ample streams of light that flow  through the colored glass. 

Like his Father, David Ascalon is also a  sculptor,  creating both small table top art objects and larger pieces.  The larger installations include memorials such as the iconic Holocaust memorial he created in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  The 15 foot sculpture that was installed along the Susquehanna River in 1994, consists of  a series of stainless steel poles entwined with a rusty-looking serpentine shaped form that references barbed wire.  The power of the piece is singular, due to the form as well as the specific contrast in metal materials.

A decade after its installation, the memorial became the subject of  heated controversy within the community of Harrisburg as well as the American arts community.   Due to an underhanded supplier of the original rust colored material, the barbed wire aspect of the piece was substandard and needed replacement.  Instead of allowing Mr. Ascalon to do the necessary repairs on his work of art, the Harrisburg Parks and Recreation Department, through the advice of a contentious lawyer,  decided to have a third party restorer do the work.  Besides replacing the barbed wire aspect with a shiny silver metal that detracted from the original artist’s intent, Ascalon’s signature was burnished off. 

The incident prompted Ascalon Studios to assert the U.S. Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, a federal copyright law allowing artists to protect their work from neglect or destruction based on what is called “moral rights”.  David’s son Eric, who had recently retired from practicing law, in order to run his father’s business,  acted as co-council in the litigation.    The case was settled out of court resulting in the appropriate restoration of the work by David Ascalon as well as restored credit.  This case, one of only a handful of VARA lawsuits on the books, is still studied by law experts and through online seminars. 

Besides the business and legal acumen Eric Ascalon brings  to Ascalon Studios,  he often contributes in the  development of concepts for the various commissions.   This was the case for the Lincoln Square ark, where he joined his father David and brother Brad in the creation of  perhaps the first innovative liturgical industrial design object  that celebrates  21^st century Jewry.  The ark doors seamlessly slide open into the larger curved surrounding structure.  Besides the bronze doors, whose material was used in the Tabernacle of Moses,  the structure combines Jerusalem stone as well as Cedar of Lebanon, a wood used in the First Temple. 

Brad Ascalon’s contribution to the ark is substantial and no surprise due to his own rising star in the contemporary industrial design scene.  He specifically conceptualized and engineered the curved form of the ark.  Although Brad collaborates on some  Ascalon Studios projects, he has his own eponymous studio and a resolute commitment to contemporary furniture design.    Brad currently  has a chair produced by Bernhardt Design, a company whose exhibit at next month’s International Furniture Fair in New York is highly anticipated.   Amongst his impressive accolades, he is one of  only two Americans ever to have designed for the upscale French furniture brand Ligne Roset.  In addition, his  “Atlas” tables are carried by Design Within Reach which also carries his  Carrara marble menorah, a modernist nod to the legacy his grandfather Maurice (who died in 2003)  has provided .  Whether looking at this minimalist sculptural  form, his father’s evocative stained glass, or Maurice Ascalon’s hammered copper 1939 masterpiece,  it is clear that the design genius found in the work is truly a family affair. 

(author's note: this article was written in 2013)