[music]
Kate Hinds: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kate Hinds in for Alison Stewart. James Hamilton knows how to capture a moment. His black-and-white photography is pretty distinct. He was a longtime staff photographer at The Village Voice, among many other places, where he captured New York with his camera from underground punk rock bands in the East Village to police raids at Tompkins Square Park. Each portrait is like a time capsule of a bygone New York era.
He also captured portraits of celebrities, like a young LL Cool J looking almost 3D in his signature Kangol cap and holding a boombox, and a long-haired barefoot Martin Scorsese looking contemplative on the couch, and Joni Mitchell clutching a tree trunk, and even Alfred Hitchcock laughing, yes laughing, in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel. Whether he's photographing a Hollywood A-lister or an anonymous New York pedestrian who's just minding their business, James Hamilton treats each shot with care and humanity.
A new documentary details his four-decade journey as a visual storyteller, and it's called Uncropped. In it, we also hear from Hamilton's collaborators and longtime friends, like director Wes Anderson, and they salute James' love for capturing New York through photographs. Uncropped is out now at the IFC Center, and it'll start streaming on Apple TV and Amazon on May 7th. Joining us now in studio is photographer James Hamilton. Hi, James.
James Hamilton: Hi, there.
Kate Hinds: Also, joining us is director D.W. Young. Hello, D.W.
D.W. Young: Hi.
Kate Hinds: Before we get started, I just wanted to say, listeners, we would like to invite you into the conversation. We are talking to James Hamilton and D.W. Young. If you have a favorite photo from his time at The Village Voice or you have a question about street photography, how does he get all those photos, give us a call, 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. You can also share your story with us on social media, Instagram, Twitter, @allofitwnyc. D.W., let's start with you. Do you remember the first time you saw James' work?
D.W. Young: I don't. I know I saw it in The Observer, and I certainly had seen it in The Voice before that in some form or another and in other various publications. I do remember there was a cover you did for, I think, Spin magazine of Sting standing on some rocks at the ocean, at the beach with a bathing suit on.
James Hamilton: In Montserrat. Yes.
D.W. Young: I remember that from being a kid. I was like, "Oh." I totally remember that cover. No, I had seen that work, but I hadn't really fully appreciated the range of what he had done initially.
Kate Hinds: What made you want to bring his work to life?
D.W. Young: It really started with our producer, Judith Mizrachy. She and I often work together, we're also married, so it's double producer kind of relationship, but she and James, however, had worked together in the past at the New York Observer. She was the photo editor there for a couple of years around 2000, 2001. She knew James and appreciated all the work he had done there, but she had also not seen the larger body of work that preceded that at The Voice and at the other publications and his street work and the set work.
During the lockdown, during COVID, James joined Facebook and started posting photos for friends while he was spending a lot more time, I think, then digitizing work and looking back at his archive. Judith started seeing a lot more and she was really blown away by it and started showing me some of it and we started talking about it. She threw out the idea, "What about a documentary about James and his work?"
I liked the idea and I liked the work tremendously, so I had to think about what that would be in terms of as a movie because the work could be great, but how does it work as a film portraying James and his career? I think as we thought about the set work and then also, most importantly, the journalism and how much James had done as a photojournalist and how that was tied into the aesthetic of his photography and the history it captured and particularly the publications he had worked at.
That expanded our concept of what the movie could be, but then it was really meeting with James, talking to him about it and hearing what he had to say and the stories behind it all and just the kind of person he was. We got along I think really nicely from the very beginning and he was open to progressing from there.
Kate Hinds: How did that progression happen? Did D.W. just say to you, "Hey, I want to make a film about you." Or did he have to warm you up a little?
James Hamilton: I think Judith got in touch with me first. When the pandemic started, I started posting pictures on Facebook, which I had never used Facebook, but it was a good time for me to look back and give myself a job and also entertain my friends. The job would be to basically digitize my film and get it in shape because I'd been on this treadmill of working for-- Well, I was a photographer for 58 years, but I started-- over 40 years I was on five different staff jobs, so I had an enormous amount of work that I had to contend with if I was going to go back and digitize it and get it in order.
That gave me that opportunity. Yes, Judith contacted me and said, "What do you think about a film about your work?" Which was stunning in a way because I had never considered it. Books, yes. As a matter of fact, I was knocked out of the game in 2009 by being run over by a rather large-
Kate Hinds: Cadillac.
James Hamilton: -Cadillac Escalade and so I was laid up for a long time with a leg injury. Thurston Moore, we were best friends or very close friends and he came out with Eva Prinz, his wife to visit and we were just talking and he said, "Why don't we do a book of your musicians?" Of which I had many many pictures mostly from working at The Village Voice. We basically spent the summer putting a book together, which was great.
It's the only monograph I've done. I did do a book on pinball in 1976. I was basically slaved to the subject of pinball and traveled the world photographing pinball for a Christmas book which turned out to be on the Times bestseller list, I mean not a bestseller list, but best Christmas books of the year kind of thing.
Kate Hinds: I'd love to talk a little bit about your work with The Village Voice which is I think where a lot of people know your work best. Were you there for over two decades?
James Hamilton: Yes.
Kate Hinds: How did you land the gig?
James Hamilton: I started working there on a freelance basis for a while, a couple of years, and then they just said, "How would you like to be the staff photographer?" That's how that happened. Before that, I had been at two other publications. I've been on staff on five different publications, which was an incredible gift, as you can imagine, to be working that much and not have to hustle. I was salaried, so I was working every day for basically 40-some years. The Voice, yes, it was a fantastic opportunity because I was working on doing all kinds of things and, again, working every day virtually.
Kate Hinds: The Voice is a really special place for those of us who have lived in New York for a long time and remember, its heyday. I wanted to play a clip of the film that captures that. This is writer Richard Goldstein, who was one of your collaborators during that time.
James Hamilton: He was an editor-
Kate Hinds: An editor.
James Hamilton: -and a writer.
Kate Hinds: Oh, great. Let's listen.
Richard Goldstein: It's this merger of art and journalism, where one was not in charge of the other, but rather they were in constant clashing, constant dialectic, the two elements of the paper. You could be as artful as you wanted to be, but it had to work as journalism, too. You could be as journalistic as you wanted to be, but it had to work as art.
Kate Hinds: Is that your sense as well? Do you agree with that?
James Hamilton: Oh, yes. We could invent our own stories, for one thing, which was fantastic. Whenever I wanted to meet somebody, I would basically invent a story or talk to an editor and say, "Why don't we do a piece about this person or that?" Nobody was really allowed to be a hack because most of their ideas everyone let them run with it.
All the editors would let people run with these ideas, and that they would just come up with based on what was happening immediately in town or something that had nothing to do with anything that was happening in town. It was an incredible gift where people had an enormous amount of control over their work. Given that, it would be hard to not think of it as some sort of art.
Kate Hinds: What was one of your most memorable assignments at The Voice?
James Hamilton: Probably going to China during Tiananmen Square when it all happened, actually. Memorable in the sense that it was obviously important and far-reaching story, but also, the fact that The Voice would actually send us to China with an interpreter. Joe Connon and I had been asking them for a long time to let us go, which is not so absurd because they had sent us to the Philippines twice during the Marcos overthrow.
Once to cover Corazon Aquino, and then when Marcos was overthrown, they sent us right back. That was also pretty amazing. We got there just as it all happened and linked with some students there who gave us bicycles to ride around and consequently, we had more access to more things because we were underground on bicycles essentially.
Kate Hinds: I want to pick this thread up in a moment. We just have to take a short break. We will be back with more with director D.W. Young and photographer James Hamilton right after this.
[music]
Kate Hinds: This is All Of It on WNYC. I am Kate Hinds in for Alison Stewart. We are talking about the new documentary Uncropped, which is about photographer James Hamilton, who joins me in studio today, along with the director of Uncropped D.W. Young. Now, just before the break, we were talking about Tiananmen. I don't want to spend too much time on it, but the thing that I did not know was that you broke into a morgue and took some of the first photographs of the death toll.
James Hamilton: Yes. It was a makeshift morgue. It was a warehouse near a hospital. It was guarded, but not well guarded because somehow we got in with the help of students. It was at night. We rode through the dark on our bicycles, broke in and they immediately started kneeling down and unzipping body bags for us to give us evidence. I had to use a flash to take pictures because it was pitch black.
I was afraid that would give us away, and it actually did. Eventually, somebody shouted that guards were coming. I managed to get a bunch of pictures and we spirited that film out of the country and with some couriers. While we were in China, pictures of dead students appeared. One appeared on the cover of The Village Voice. The evidence was there and I don't think anyone else got it that I remember.
Kate Hinds: Did you know that story?
D.W. Young: I did not. That was one of the stories I think when we first met with James that he recounted that blew us away and really hammered home the power of a lot of the work that he had done too. It was not just New York as well.
Kate Hinds: Again, that was something I didn't know before I saw the documentary was how well-traveled you were. You basically traveled the world.
James Hamilton: Yes. Grenada, that "war". The Philippines as I mentioned, and the Caribbean lots of war zones. The Chinese experience led to the London Sunday Times asking me if I would go to Ethiopia to cover the war there, which was probably the most harrowing thing I ever did because we were under fire constantly. I had never been in an experience like that.
Kate Hinds: Wow. I'd love to talk more about that, but I also want to make sure we talk about your work in New York, which is so important as well. Your love for the city and the people here really comes through in it. I wanted to play a clip from one of the producers of the filmmaker, Wes Anderson, describe your work.
Wes Anderson: Every day I receive a photograph from James and I put it in a special file, Hamilton's. It's an incredible ongoing document of the times and places of his life. When I think of New York, my life here, James was always a part of it. I have a lot of experiences of crawling into that Jeep and buzzing around this place. Not a comfortable way to get around at all, but get a lot done.
James Hamilton: Most of my history is living in New York, and the people that pass through are the portraits. I think that's what I've done mostly is document my life in New York. It's like a diary, really.
Kate Hinds: I love that explanation, but what's that impulse that makes you want to document your life?
James Hamilton: Well, I was an art student at Pratt before I ever picked up a camera. I wish I'd picked it up long ago. I was about 20 when I first picked up a camera. Not a part-time, I got a summer job working for a fashion photographer. It was after my second year at Pratt. I was working for him in the studio, but what I loved doing was borrowing his cameras and walking the streets and taking pictures.
That's how I discovered what I really, really wanted to do in life was make pictures and basically record, maybe document my life in New York through pictures in the street, really. That's how it all began. I didn't know what I was going to do with that. I didn't know how I was going to proceed with that. I never went back to Pratt. I stayed with him for two years, pretty much learned what I could learn in the studio, but I didn't want to be a studio photographer really at all.
I didn't know what I was going to do, so I wound up hitchhiking around the country for five months taking pictures all over the states. I knew that I was probably going to be some sort of journalist if I could be. I also loved doing portraits. I didn't know how I was going to combine at all, but I finally figured it out.
Kate Hinds: You say in the documentary that you love artifacts, you collect things like flipbooks. I'm reminded that your last documentary was the story about booksellers and the economy of old and new books. It seems like there's a through line there between the two of you and the way you look at objects in history.
D.W. Young: James is a little bit of a collector in that way. I think certainly the reality that The Village Voice and these other publications have now become historical objects as printed matter and most significantly in The Voice's case, not really digitized and available as archives, which I think if there's something of tremendous value that hopefully will be digitized soon. I think that was a tie-in for sure.
James Hamilton: I am a collector. I'm a collector of two things really. Movies, I have thousands of movies.
Kate Hinds: When you say you have thousands, how do you keep them?
James Hamilton: I keep them in two places. I have the apartment here and I made copies of everything for my house in East Hampton. I have an enormous number of photo books too. That's the other collection I have.
Kate Hinds: I'm curious, one of the things you talked about in the film that really struck me was how years ago when you started photography, you could capture someone unguarded. Now, people, they see a camera and they immediately think selfie, they're trained, they pose, how do you feel about that?
James Hamilton: It makes shooting in the street a lot more difficult. Plus the fact if people aren't taking pictures of their cell phones or looking at their cell phones. The street action is limited, shall we say. That's one thing. I would be shooting film if I could afford it, I'll tell you because I still loved the process of shooting film. Digital allowed me to shoot color because I could never afford color film and I never processed color film and I had to process everything I ever shot anyway.
It becomes difficult because people are in a way more guarded because they don't know what's going to happen to that image. It might wind up on the internet, who knows where it's going to wind up. People are very wary of cameras in the street now. Especially a real camera rather than a phone camera.
Kate Hinds: We just have a minute or so left. D.W., I'm wondering what you as a filmmaker have taken away from your time with James. How you are going to approach your next documentary?
D.W. Young: I think I learned a lot from James which was a great pleasure. I think I learned a lot aesthetically in terms of making images. I'm not a photographer nor really a cinematographer, but in terms of thinking about composition and lighting, and all that, spending that much time with James's work, you can't help but learn a lot.
I think I learned how much fun it is to make a movie with James, as other directors have because we got to talk about movies all the time, and that's what we did. That's a wonderful way to do it. I also just think, as Michael Daly talks about the end of the film, James, his work ethic, his ethos, and all that it's, I think, very compelling. Seeing how James works, that's also an inspiring aspect of making the movie with him.
Kate Hinds: Yes. Hearing how people describe how you make subjects comfortable, almost by your lack of, you just seamlessly move into a scene and there's not a lot of fuss and you're quiet and thoughtful. I think that that's an approach that I hadn't thought a lot about before just being the observer who then documents was really interesting.
James Hamilton: Well, it could be that people are used to a photographer banging away the minute they come into the room, but it was never like that. I actually talked to people much more than I took pictures. I think that helped a lot with just easing the situation, which could be routine for a lot of people.
Kate Hinds: The film is called Uncropped. It is a documentary about the work of James Hamilton and directed by D.W. Young. It's playing now at the IFC theatre and it will be streaming very soon. Thank you so much for joining me.
D.W. Young: Thank you so much.
James Hamilton: Thank you, Kate.
Kate Hinds: That is this hour of All Of It. Coming up next, you're going to hear highlights from our recent Get Lit with All Of It conversation about the slasher novel. Also, Frank Waln rapper. Stay with us. This is All Of It.
[music]
[00:22:14] [END OF AUDIO]

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.