W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #secrets, #unknownphotographer, #collecting

Here is little bit more about secrets.

Secrets happen when the lady in the picture says, “Come closer.”  You don’t know why, but you follow her lead.  You become a co-conspirator or collaborator, as she or he beckon you draw nearer and you do.  Think of the Mona Lisa smile.  It is bafflingly enigmatic, and you look and look.  

My history as a collector is known to a degree.  The attached image is, in fact, the very first one I acquired.  It is not a great photograph, but it demonstrates the power of secrets.

I was an actor for many years, and my first real job was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a show called “The Proposition” which was a very successful improvised revue.  The cast was very sharp, and the management of the company maintained a very cynical, depressed atmosphere, I imagine thinking that would make the performers work from a more neurotic place which would give the show an edge.  I was dreadfully unhappy, depressed, alone and broke.  The only outlet for me was walking about endlessly.

One place I would go by was a frame shop that seemed to have been going out of business for many years.  I would wander in and look through the stock and return to one piece in particular.  It was a framed photographic image of a faceless figure, seated Madonna-like with peacock feather arms.  In retrospect I see it as very gay, but I was younger and at odds with life and sex.  Unformed.  The frame was not so tasteful molded gold and would have not been out of place in a ladies powder room.  I paid $40 as I recall. That was the food budget for the week.

I took it home to my garret-like studio apartment with the water bed and arm chair from Goodwill that I had tried to dye black.  It was the center piece of my mad attempt to mimic a stylish bedroom I’d seen in The New York Times.  I would put a towel over the seat of the chair so as not to get black on my clothes, sit back, smoke a joint, drink vodka and stare despairingly and endlessly at the photograph.   At some point the shrouded lady would emerge from the frame, move to some imagined chair nearby and console me.   

“Hang on.  It’ll get better” she would offer.

That to me was the “power of photography.”   

Considering the secrets in great photographs is bit like holding Pandora’s box in your lap.  I imagine this artist had sense of their power. Photographer and writer Robert Adams would say,  “Every photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.” *1  

At some point in the years after, I became a fairly visible collector of what I described as ”magical, heart stopping images of people in which you do not see the eyes”, as well as a dealer, teacher, fund raiser, and writer — a champion of photography and photographers, and I found her again.  I had tucked the photograph, folded in half, into a book in my library, for safe keeping probably.  A time capsule.  I like the horizontal crease. 

That is the where and when, and it does get better.  

But the mute, blank face brought me to her.  It was insistent, demanding.  “Think!  Feel!  Be!”

There is a very satisfying Robert Doisneau quote which in English reads.  “I don’t usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.” *3

I use another simple principle of looking which has to do with geometry and numbers.  I like the Euclidean metaphor from geometry.  I demonstrate this by asking as student, say to ask me when I signal, ”How much is 2 + 2?”  I respond “4” before they have fully posed the question.  In other words, I interrupt them and get there first.  They will look at what I have been looking at and put it together as I did more quickly, and they will agree.  “Yes, it is good.”  “How did you know that?”  I have an eye.  

This analogy is to describe what is having an eye.  It simply means that someone with an eye” takes their collective experience of looking, intuition, and boldness to declare that something is “great”.  Other people gathered ultimately agree;  the guy with the eye got there first.

And that’s how to look.

For the past several years I have focused my energies as a collector on searching out photographs of American groups made before 1965.  The date has always been a bit arbitrary but a way of my dealing only with the photographs and not the makers.  There is Collection Blind Pirate with the groups and its predecessor Collection Dancing Bear with magical, heart stopping images of people whose eyes cannot be seen.  That latter collection was what gave me my initial life in the photography world.

Nonetheless I got excited about a contemporary image by RaMell Ross which has an eerie connection to the anonymous still life of the figurine.  His “Caspera” 2019 really hit me.  It’s like so many photographs I have collected with a single, shrouded figure seemingly unengaged by anything more than standing in front of the camera.  But the enigmas call out as many stories as you can conjure.  The covering is reported to be the photographer’s dark cloth under which the artist sights and focuses the camera on the subject.  The camera is a large format one so this is not a casual snap.  He meant this.  

The figure is dark but surrounded by color.  The Hale County Alabama clay is red and swirls around the subject which is further anchored by the horizontal swath of green up top.  

Hale County was the stomping ground of the great Walker Evans and William Christenberry so there is some history of photography thrown in too.   

It made my heart pound.  

Years ago I found a press print referred to as “Mafia Trial Witness” which is what must have been written on the back but which always struck me as Casper the friendly Ghost’s day testifying in court. 

Your heart will always tell you which ones are great.

*1 Robert Adams, “Why People Photograph”,

*2 Robert Doisneau, _________ 1987)

©2021

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