LW: Joel, as you know, we’ve
been looking at pictures together—and, more to the point,
I’ve been looking at your pictures with you—for
many years now, and I just wanted to show you some things I
recently put together in a little scrapbook, to see whether
they resonate for you at all, starting with this image of yours
here, which was taken roughly when?
JM: Oh, in the mid-’80s, 1983, ’84, ’85
. . .
LW: And from where?
JM: From Nineteenth Street, between Sixth and Seventh
Avenues, in Chelsea, which is where I had my studio at the
time. It’s
one of
a series of such pictures called Looking South. I suppose I
was thinking about the landscape of lower Manhattan as a mountain
range, something far away. And the highest peaks in the mountain
range, of course, were the Twin Towers.
Jan Vermeer, View of Delft c. 1658
LW: My response to those pictures, even at the time—I
mean, I saw them long before the Twin Towers came down, and
now I saw them again more recently, when you showed them at
your daughter’s gallery in the wake of the September
11 disaster—but even before that, the series in general
and this one in particular reminded me of Vermeer’s
View of Delft, this painting here. Now, partly that had to
do with
the ratio of sky to ground, the clouds, obviously, the sense
of spires. You could make an argument that the View of Delft
is a mountain range also, in terms of distance.
JM: Exactly. I mean I’ve often thought that for Vermeer,
in that low, flat country that Holland was, the view across
the river like that, at those—well, they were like skyscrapers
in his time—all that verticality in the midst of all
that horizontality, it must have been like gazing upon a mountain
range, or the closest he ever had to the experience. And as
for the similarity in the light: Well, for many years when
I was working on Cape Cod, doing photographs of the horizon
line, the big bowl of space and sea and sky, there were days
I called “Delft days.” Literally, out of all
those pictures, there are a half of dozen photographs that
have about
them the purity, clarity, and cleanliness of those northern
days that you can get in Holland and Belgium and the North
Sea.
Albert Bierstadt
Rocky Mountains, ‘Lander’s Peak’ 1863
LW: It’s the same sea.
JM: The same sea, yes, just the other side. And now,
looking at Vermeer’s picture in relation to this Looking South
picture of mine, I certainly admit to having had some—from
my days as an art student and my love of art history—there
certainly is an inflection of those Delft views, tiny little
paintings though they were.
LW: After the disaster on September 11th, of course,
that whole series of yours became, in retrospect, a sort
of premonitory
dirge—that’s certainly how it felt at the show
at your daughter’s gallery. But what’s interesting
about that, in this context, is that the View of Delft, although
for us today it looks like an occasion of utter peace and tranquility
and so forth, anybody looking at it around the time it was
made would have had an entirely different response. For it,
too, is about a hole in the landscape—only after the
fact, instead of, as with yours, before. Because a few years
earlier, one of the most prominent buildings on the Delft skyline,
slotted there in the distance between those two spires, where
the puddle of light is, was the town’s armory. Remember,
they were only just coming out of a period of great and terrible
warfare, and the armory was stocked
full of explosives, which one day, a few years before Vermeer
painted this picture, had accidentally ignited in a terrible,
disastrous conflagration, killing all kinds of people, including
Carel Fabritius, universally regarded as the greatest painter
of Delft from the generation immediately prior to Vermeer’s.
So this cityscape, at the time Vermeer painted it, would have
had a completely different resonance, much like the one that
yours subsequently came to.
Anyway, that just establishes a context for some of the things
I wanted to show you, because, of course, after September 11th,
you went down and took to photographically documenting the
recovery efforts at Ground Zero for—how many weeks,
months?
JM: I started photographing in mid-September, and
I ended when they finally finished clearing the site and
closed it in June.
So, I was there the whole eight and half months with the
cleanup crew, taking 8,500 photographs.
Piranesi
from Carceri d’Invenzione c. 1745
LW: And a few months after that you had a show of
some of those photos right near Ground Zero—just a
few months ago.
JM: Yes, on the first anniversary of September 11th,
in 2002, we opened a show at 195 Broadway, just a block away
from Ground
Zero, to give visitors a sense of the effort that had gone
into the work of recovery, and maybe a bit of catharsis.
I created very large photographs so people could have the
sense
of actually standing and looking into the site, rather than
just at photographs of it.
LW: As we were walking through that show together
one afternoon, I kept on having this whole set of associations,
and I wanted
to talk to you about whether those were idiosyncratic to
me, or whether you perhaps shared some of them then, as you
were
taking the pictures in the first place, or perhaps later
as you were choosing which ones to highlight, or later still,
looking back on them. In effect, I want to talk to you about
the degree to which images from the past create a context
for
ordering and approaching the chaos of the present.
For example, speaking of mountain ranges, in this pairing
here . . .
[See previous page.]
JM: Hunh, wow, good one, Ren. Well, yes, this is my
photograph of
a day when they were far enough along in the site—at
this point it was probably January—such that every time
they pulled something out of the pile, huge blasts of smoke
and ash would come boiling out, because oxygen would go into
the fires down below and they would literally explode. As the
smoke dissipated and rose, it created a veil in the sky. And,
at that particular moment, the sun glinting off the edge of
one of the skyscrapers sent bands of light through the smoky
cloud. Had there not been a cloud there, there wouldn’t
have been those rays, it just would have been a silvery glitter.
But what-ever was in the smoke allowed the rays themselves
to take on a
kind of visibility, as, yes, in this . . .
LW: This is an Albert Bierstadt. And the thing I’m wondering
is, is this association mine or were you having a similar one
out there on the site—that is, to this tradition of
the sublime, the Alpine sublime or, in this case, the Rockies
sublime?
JM: Well, I might not have been thinking specifically
of Bierstadt, but I was thinking sublime, without doubt—and for months—I
was recognizing that I was in a new definition of the sublime.
The
awesome, horrific transformation of this place—although
it wasn’t nature itself—it was man acting as
nature and bringing these buildings down. The collapse of
these buildings
was the cataract, the chasm, the Grand Canyon, it had the
same kind of awesome . . .
Caspar David Friedrich
Abbey in the Oak Wood c. 1809
LW: Well, as in Rilke’s poem, how “beauty
is just the beginning of
a terror we can only just barely endure, and we admire it
so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel
is terrible.”
JM: Hunh, yes: terrible. Awe-inspiring.
LW: What about this matching: Piranesi and what is
this?
JM: This is the Winter Garden, in the World Financial
Center. A great arched space with two enormous buildings
on either
side. I stood there and I thought, well, not so much of Piranesi
as of the Baths
of Caracalla in Rome, those huge vaulted ruins, how they
must have looked to people in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries,
and then later, all the ancient ruins, those great collapsed
structures in the landscape. And I felt like a visitor in
that romantic moment, but here it was this horror.
LW: Speaking of which, what of this? Caspar David
Friedrich.
JM: Ah, well, we’re old buddies, he and I. We
certainly have crossed paths before.
LW: This is the picture of?
JM: This is the picture that I call The North Wall.
It was the last remaining vestige of the North Tower and
was indeed cathedral-
like in its structure. But it was on one of those days when
as the
day waned and the light went down, the clouds suddenly turned
pink. I had one of those momentary pauses where I thought, “God,
I shouldn’t take this photograph. It’s too beautiful.
Is it right to
have this beauty in all this horror?” And I thought, “Well,
of course. Nature’s indifference will always suggest
correspondences that
you can’t possibly imagine, you just have to accept
them.”
LW: Of course, there is a long tradition of Romantic
imagery in the face of ruins, which is all about death and
beauty and
so forth. You didn’t invent that. And in a sense Friedrich,
for example, creates a context for the association. Look
how in his image pilgrims seem
to be moving through a cemetery.
JM: And of course I was in a cemetery too. You don’t
see me and the men who are there, but, in fact, we were all
standing
on the graves of three thousand people.
Rembrandt
The Night Watch, 1642
LW: How about this?
JM: Well, yes, The Night Watch. And yes, I had exactly
the same association. It was night and there were about fifty
firemen
and policemen in the bowels of the South Tower, illuminated
by cold sodium-vapor lamps shining down into the site. In
the center was
a tungsten light that was glowing almost orange. The men
had just come upon the remains of five of their comrades
and they
were shouting, and I came running over this incredibly dangerous
pile,
and as I reached the crest and looked down into this twisted
steel battleground and saw these men there, I just raised
my camera, made the photograph. And I just knew viscerally
from
the way the men were displayed—remember I didn’t
control anything, I didn’t move a person, I didn’t
even move myself: I came to the spot where
I could stand and what I saw rendered itself very much like
The Night Watch. In some way the quality of that glowing light
in the center,
the assembled men, the kind of smoky background, all the hardware
of the destruction of it gave me the feeling of those lances
and curtains and all that heraldry. It was a gut reaction—although
I couldn’t call up the painting exactly, I just knew
this grand assembly was a powerful image.
Frans Hals
Banquet of the Officers of the
St. Hadrian Civic Guard Company
c. 1627
LW: And this?
JM: That’s Charlie Vitchers and the Trades—the fifty
trades foremen that ran the World Trade Center site—at
their morning meeting, and Charlie Vitchers, over here on the
right-hand side, is the overriding brain. He carried the entire
site in his head, didn’t need notes. He could tell every
one of these fifty people what they were going to be doing,
what their crews were going to be doing that day. And I admit
that when I was in that humble double trailer with Formica
walls and crappy fluorescent lighting with them sitting there,
arrayed along that handmade wooden table, I didn’t
have exactly . . .
LW: This particular picture?
JM: Yeah, this—what is it?—Banquet of the St. Hadrian
Civic Guards —in my mind. But I did have a memory of,
you know, for example, Hals and his images of the elders of
the various charities—the
clusters of those guys with their big ruffs on and all of
their paraphernalia, the group of wise men, of burghers who
were
. . .
LW: And here, instead of the ruffs, these guys have
on these strange orange vests, and this guy in particular
over
here
to the right, he’s just straight out of that era.
JM: Oh, definitely. Down there they called him Colonel
Sanders. But his name is Marty Siegal and he’s a forty-year
veteran of the building trades, building skyscrapers and
cities and
things like
that. I definitely had a sense that gathered here before
me was
the assembled wisdom of all these trades.
Anonymous
Amateurs of 1861
(Union Army engineers)
LW: And this pairing?
JM: Well, indeed. This is a photograph of Rescue Unit
Ten, I think,
or Seven—I’m not sure what the numbers were at
that moment, but it’s part of a firemen’s rescue
unit that was working down at the
site, and they’d come out of the site for their break
and collapsed
in these chairs, of which there were thousands strewn around
the
site. And, yes, as they sat there I too recalled those Civil
War
photographs and the pictures from the Crimean War, where
the ranks and officers are gathered together outside a tent
. .
.
LW: With a flag . . . This is a long tradition going
back to Brady and
so forth. Did you feel that at the moment you were taking
it?
JM: Oh yeah, I connected with the Brady images, which
probably weren’t made by Brady, they were made by O’Sullivan
or Jackson
or any of the others, but I had the same sense of history repeating
itself, people assembled after carnage or destruction or before
battle, and they’re dispersed in a way that is casual,
from fatigue
or just . . . And I knew, I felt myself in a continuity with
the past.
LW: What’s interesting to me is that history repeats
itself, not only in how people arrange themselves, but in how
the portraitist
of them stands in relation to them. In other words, the place
where
you choose to stand and aim your camera and so forth, the image
you choose to take is a part of a history of images that forms
a reservoir of such tropes in your head. You didn’t attempt
a closeup of, say, him—you stood at a distance, this
specific distance, which
is a distance that has a history.
JM: Absolutely right. There is also a distance here
of respect, caution . . .
LW: Which was also true of the Civil War photographers,
too.
JM: Yeah. But, there were also mechanical problems
for the Civil War guys. They needed to be at that distance
so that their
slow, cumbersome equipment, glass plates, could be sharp
enough all
the way across so that everything was in focus and far enough
back so they could get everybody in—they didn’t
have zoom lenses. In my own case, there was a certain hostility
pervasive at the site, because firemen didn’t want their
pictures taken, and one had to be on
one’s toes to make pictures that were graceful and yet
demanding enough. You can see one guy in the center here, he’s
basically telling me “No.” He actually said to
me “No,” and I basically said, “Yes. It doesn’t
matter what you say, I’m doing this.” So we had
our little standoff here. But if I’d crossed the distance,
the line,
I could have incited his physical—at the very least
his walking away. One has to feel it out in the instance.
What
else do you have?
Velázquez
Mars c. 1650
LW: Well, this.
JM: Amazing. What a guy. He was a welder, commonly
called a burner down there. His job was to go through the
site and as
each level was exposed, he would walk through with a torch
and burn
all the small standing steel so that men could walk through
and
do their search.
LW: Do you know his name?
JM: I do know his name . . . Paul
Pursley.
LW: What is fascinating to me here is that we’re playing
off the Velázquez of Mars with his tool and his helmet
and his mustache.
I don’t want to suggest or insist that you had this
specific thing in your head, but you too are treating this
worker as
a kind of god
or a personage of great nobility.
JM: I was just going to say that he was noble. The
reason I saw
him as noble was that he came up the road bend here, and
I saw him, and we had just heard a bugler playing Taps,
and there
were eight of us standing around and we were all in tears
and as he came to me I saw this little glint of a tear
in his eye – you
can see it in the photograph, he’s slightly dewy-eyed.
And as he came forward, I just felt the power of this man
and his nobility, and I stepped in front
of him and just made a photograph. We didn’t have much
of an interaction. He really didn’t even pose for me,
he just stopped walking.
And then I asked him something and he laughed and he said, “I
was just wounded today. I was burning the steel and I exploded
some ammunition that was buried.” He said, “A
piece of bullet shell hit
me in the face and I got five stitches under here.” He
laughed.
He laughed. And then he just stood there and I made this
picture and I realized he is heroic.
LW: One of the things that’s amazing about Velázquez
is how when he chooses to do a god, for perhaps one of the
first times in history the god is just some mill worker. I
mean, this is clearly some guy who worked as some smithy or
something, who knows who he is. This is some guy who is a working-class
guy, patently not a nobleman, you don’t think?
JM: No, not a nobleman.
LW: And yet a god. So, that’s kind of interesting.
Millet
The Gleaners, 1857
JM: A
beautiful combination. As is this one. So here we have
Millet’s
Gleaners, and my picture of the rakers. Without doubt I
was referencing—not the painting so much, as in trying
to remake the painting, but the act. These men, for five
of the
eight months down there, they were either on their hands
and knees with small hand tools – garden tools—or
they were standing with the rakes and they were doing this
incredible
ancient gesture of pulling a tined instrument through the
rubble, looking to turn over bones, relics, that would
give some identification.
They did it with such perseverance and devotion that it
was like a sacred ancient gesture renewed in their Day-Glo
green
and orange vests. It was both humble and grand and it was
against this huge scale of the city behind them, so they
were diminished
by it. And over and over again, when I saw them reach down
to pick something up, I would feel the Millet…
LW: The combination of humility and grandeur.
JM: Yeah. And the sturdiness. I mean, look at the
women in the Millet, how sturdy they are. They’re bent; they’re
like stacks of wheat. They go down there—they never have
to get up. They’re
permanent. And these guys, their gesture, too, was permanent.
Grant Wood
American Gothic, 1930
JM: American Gothic and my photograph of a father and
son.
LW: Not husband and wife but father and son.
JM: Father and son. They were looking for the missing
brother. They were both firemen, these guys, he was retired,
and they
were a part of the raking crew. I saw these men one day,
there was a last column left in the site–a sixty-two-ton, fifty-foot-high
column—one afternoon I saw the son climbing on the father’s
back, the son on the father’s back, climbing up the column
to paste a photograph of the missing brother on this totemic
column, and the old man was just there like a pier, I mean
a pier holding something up, and the son slithered up the father’s
back and braced himself and stood up onto this column, and
I went over and photographed them. And through that act of
recognition of what they were doing, we became friends. For
the next two months, I would see them just about every single
day, they were there seven days a week looking for the son,
and finding many other bones, and the son here—down at
the site—was called the Raven because he found more bones
than anybody else. His nickname was the Raven. This gesture,
the two of them standing so similar to American Gothic, I have
to say, American Gothic didn’t play in my mind, but I
recognized the way they were standing—they were talking
to a third guy, who was next to me, who you can’t see.
I just insinuated myself into the space and made the picture
of the them. I didn’t pose them at all, it was their
posture. And I think you see their erect, determined stance,
and the kindness with which they’re standing and the
readiness with which they’re standing.
So, one reads into their stance all of the human capacities.
LW: Here’s one that I don’t have a particular
match for, but you can see in it Rodin maybe, or the Discus
Thrower
. . .
JM: It’s a picture of an ironworker pulling
a great cabled hook to lift some steel, and for me, actually,
it
evokes Rubens
or Titian.
LW: And did at the time?
JM: No, at the time it was a balletic gesture of
the man coming forward to the front plane of the frame,
carrying this heavy
thing.
I tried lifting that—it’s like fifty pounds or
more! He’s moving with
it with a kind of ballet gracefulness . . .
LW: Ballet, by the way, itself comes out of a tradition
of looking at paintings and creating them onstage. Stage
pictures. So
there’s that whole tradition.
And finally, what of this one here? I immediately read
it as a kind of deconstructivist riff on an American flag,
a kind
of Cubist American flag, with the redness and the blueness
and the whiteness, the blue-and-white rectangle in the
upper left hand corner, the red stripes. Did that feel
that way to
you as you were taking it?
JM: Absolutely. This is October. I call it Autumn
Afternoon, because the quality of the day was one of those
pristine days
where it feels good to be alive. In fact, I saw it as a
red-white-and-blue day. It was
a jumbled kind of flag, and I definitely felt the flag
power, the call
of the flag, there. Without seeing stars and stripes, but
seeing the
blue sky, the white clouds, the red buildings. Yeah, it
was a striped, glorious moment.
I have to say, taking photographs is such an instantaneous
act. The recognition and acting on the recognition, depending
on your equipment, is close to instantaneous. No more time
than three minutes elapsed between recognizing the capacity
of this image to connect and provoke me and then setting
up the big camera and
putting in the film. All of that was within three minutes.
If it were a small camera [snaps his fingers three times],
it would have been instantaneous. Take a breath, you take
a picture. But it definitely
registered flaglike.
Jasper Johns
Three Flags, 1958
LW: But isn’t that the whole point about photography,
how it’s instantaneous, more or less? It’s not
something you set up. Can
you talk about how the reservoir of things you’ve seen
prepares you to see other things? Or at any rate prepares you
to see them in particular ways. By the way, I don’t think
that’s unique to you, I think it’s true of all
artists, and I’m just using this as an example and
a particularly vivid one, precisely because you were being
thrown
into vistas of such chaos and overwhelming horror, a place
where you might otherwise have been expected to be overwhelmed
by the chaos of feelings and sensations. Somehow, you are
gifted with this tradition that you carry with you, that
you can fall
back on, or that prepares you to see things. Does that
make sense to you?
JM: Absolutely. None of us are free of references.
And when you grow up in the world of art, things stick
to you. I’m
covered with imagery that has meant something to me, that has
caught my attention over time, certainly they’re swirling
around me at all times, like the moons of Saturn. I’m
not always sure I’m identifying anything, but they
make a composite of me, as well as things I have seen in
the real
world, gestures that I may not have had time to photograph,
but even they stick with me as great moments of beauty
that I have missed. So when I see them again, I am awakened,
because
I want to be faster this time, I want to get them this
time. But dealing not only with the things one misses,
one is always
carrying a chapbook of images around.
LW: Frank Gehry once told me that he never passes
a Dumpster, walking down the street, without looking in
and
Hoovering up
the shapes—that was his word—the random shapes,
and he has this whole repository of bent and twisted shapes
to draw on.
JM: And you can see from his work that he has found
a vocabulary of those shapes: He likes the clashing and
the asymmetries
and randomness of that. For a street photographer like
myself, randomness is everything, because that’s one thing
the world has in abundance, and I am just passing through
it with
my snare. My camera is a snare. I can throw this sieve out
there and I can capture things in
it. And risking that gesture all the time is part of the
joy of seeing, because I don’t have to stretch a canvas,
I don’t have to mix the paints, I don’t have
to light the studio. I walk around in the world, which
is bombarding
me with sensations all the time . . .
LW: But the point is, your response is not random.
JM: No, no. The response is more and more coherent
as one gets older and drags this long train of images and
memories behind.
You begin to see things that are identifiably yours—and
yet, of course, yours in the context of a long tradition
which has itself become part of you.
