Dave Heath Interview (1996)

Dave Heath was born on this day in 1931, and died exactly 85 years later. He was my 4th year professor at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in 1986/1987, and continued as my mentor after that.

Heath was a great photographer and perhaps an even better teacher. I interviewed him at home in Toronto at the ten year mark of our acquaintance, and even though I asked a lot of questions about the famous people he crossed paths with, he manages to bring keen perceptions to the conversation throughout.

Chris Buck: Over the years we've talked about your relationship with students and how frustrating or satisfying the relationships were.

Dave Heath: I was teaching at Ryerson for 26 years, overall I was teaching 31 years. With Ryerson it's a very strange thing. There must have been at least 2,000 students who went through my classes - on paper at any rate - in that 26 years. That's a lot. You don't teach 2,000 people over those years. I mean, literally. There were people who were going through the motions. Why are they there? Why am I there? Where am I coming from, where are they coming from?

Where do you think they are coming from?

From a society and a culture that entraps young people. It was difficult enough when I was a kid, but at 16 I could drop out of high school - it had to be official - but I could drop out with very little difficulty, get those working papers, and find a job. Wasn't much of a job - photo-finishing - but it was a start in photography for me.

You can do that now, couldn't you? I remember when I was in high school there were kids dropping out at 16.

Yes, but where do they usually end up? On the street, drugs - it's a different world. Now, at 16 you can't go and get a job. People are asking for a high school degree, period. Even for photofinishing. I'm saying it was easier back when I was 16, after the war, late '40s.

It makes me think about something I saw in the paper, just a partial headline I noticed, that the students today are already condemned toward bankruptcy. Because they have to go to school - where else are they gonna go - they have to borrow all that money; nobody has that kind of money in their savings account. So they're doomed; they're going to be paying back their debts forever. I've known students whose first impulse is to work off their debt for the first five years after school, or ten years after school, whatever it was, just to get it out of the way.

But photography is a glib kind of avocation - I won't even call it a vocation - in terms of people coming into school to learn it. Often enough I would have students - and I could understand what they were saying - who chose photography because they didn't have the talent to be a painter or a writer, whatever. Which leaves you to wonder: does it not take talent to be a photographer? Obviously not, in that sense. There's a certain ease and facility to the medium. Some people go in because it's "easy." The conflict for me with people like that is my seriousness. I dropped out of high school, not to drop out of high school per se, but to become a photographer - even to work in photofinishing. I live and breathe photography - think it, eat it, whatever. It's life to me. That's the way any art should be to any artist, whatever the medium is. The true artist is one that makes no distinction or separation about their involvement in a medium. It's the same way I'm wearing glasses – they are an automatic part of me. So the conflict was always there, I was putting demands on people as if they were as serious as I have been over the years and when I was their age. And of course most of them couldn’t meet that.

And also it has to do with waves, one year it can be full with people, a number of people, that connect and have some exchange between each other. And then, and it can be the next year, they're all deadheads. Literally. There were always individual people who would somehow connect, and, how do you explain this - it's one of the mysteries of life if you will. What is the magic of it? What is the chemistry of it? We talk about chemistry in terms of romance, love, marriage, but it's true in terms of almost everything we do as human beings.

When I came to you to be my advisor, I came up to you after the first class. You set up a meeting and I came by your office, probably showed you a couple pictures I had and after that you said “yes.” I'm guessing that's how it happened, I don't really remember.

The only issue was simply to make a connection. I don't think - I may be wrong--but I don't think I ever turned a student away who wanted to come to me to be an advisor. There were times when the students were so bad (laughs) that other teachers would have nothing to do with them so I was the last recourse. It's not that they really wanted me, but I was the last teacher they could approach.

Can you look at someone's work, like a dozen pictures, and say "this person has talent" or "this person doesn't have talent"?

Everybody has talent, that's what's not understood. Genius is something else. Genius - and I don't mean it in a glorified sense, I mean genius in terms of a special inspiration. But everybody's capable.

What is the magic of a human being as a child? All children dance, sing, poeticize, tell stories, the whole gamut that eventually you think of as a medium or an art. And it's not education that takes it out of them - I've heard this argument ever since I've been teaching - no, it's something in the growth of the human being that begins to rationalize. By the time you're seven or eight your cerebral capacity to rationalize takes over so you lose a lot of that instinctual impulse, which in a way is more primitive. It's often said that artists never grow up.  

I was watching something on TV, about a half a dozen young kids, I guess seven or eight years old, dancing. And I could see one of them - I could see this one little girl in that group had the body instinct of a dancer. Not that she would become a dancer, but she could become a dancer. She knew the beat, she felt the beat. The others were going through the motions because they were taught that at this point you do this or that, but she had the body rhythm to the music. There's a psychologist named Howard Gardner who doesn't use the IQ test. He believes there are eight intelligences, and one is a body intelligence, another is an oral intelligence, one is a social intelligence, etc.

But when students do hand their work to you or they come to you, do you kind of register that this person has it or this person doesn’t? Or that person is in the wrong field?

I suppose so. I generally don't like to approach it that way. I know some teachers will lay it on the line like that.

You see, images are wonderful. They're like dreams, they reveal a lot about a person if you understand images. I'm not talking about photographs as such, I'm talking about images. We dream in images. Unconsciously people reveal something of themselves just like when they doodle. Photographs can be like that too; you can see some sort of revelation about the person and try and deal with that and guide it.

I see a lot of young photographers portfolios when they approach me for assisting work and maybe half the books are good in that there's a sense of a clearness of vision, and the other half are like textbooks - oh, he's doing Cartier-Bresson, or she’s doing Richard Avedon, or whatever.  

The thing that you're observing, that this person might be imitating Cartier-Bresson or Avedon, may be a necessary process in their learning - you don't always know that. I try not to make judgements, like, “oh, this guy's going to be a great photographer” or “she's going to be a great photographer,” or this he or she is going to be a deadhead five years down the line. It would've ruined me personally to have made those kinds of judgements. But they're also false in that there have been people who you couldn't judge that clearly in terms of the work they were doing in school. It might have been just average or mediocre, but somehow, five years or ten years down the line they flowered. There are people who, in school, can seem imaginative or creative, but once that environment is taken away from them the rug is pulled out from under them and they flounder.

I've seen this in art school, artists who, in school, young, the way they make a mark on paper - amazing. I would be flabbergasted - boy, I wish I could do that! But it never sustained itself. School is not indicative of what somebody becomes, school is simply a foundation, a guide, a help. What happens after somebody is 30, I always said, was the important issue. A lot of students now come to school when they're 30, but in a way,  most often it's too late, they're still floundering in terms of what they want.

I agree with that. You look at great photographers - you tend to see they did their strongest, most focussed work between the ages of 30 and 50. I think it's different in music, certainly popular music, it tends to be between 20 and 30.

Yeah, when they're younger. Something about music and mathematics that flowers in people much more early. 

When did you go to New York City?

I went to New York January of 1957, so I was 26 years old, or turning 26, I was 25.

I moved to New York about two weeks before my 26th birthday.

Oh really? Yes, it's a good time.

I've been in New York for 6 years and I think it's different now even from when I started out.  In the 6 years since I've moved there I think it's gotten significantly more competitive.  More people in the field than when I started.

God, how can it be more? You see, again, when I was there, it was still the generation of the depression and pre-depression. So it was competitive, New York is always competitive, but the numbers were not extreme. I can remember, I came across an early photograph of mine the other day of a woman sort of sitting on a bench, sort of on her knees, turned, looking out the window at the Museum of Modern Art in the evening. She's looking into the garden but I remembered how empty the Museum could be even in the daytime. Back in those days, numbers weren't the issue. The only places you could show photography in those days was Limelight and the Museum of Modern Art. And occasionally, as probably my first show was in a group show, in a library.

When you moved to New York, aside from taking pictures, you also assisted commercial photographers. And you approached Irving Penn once. Tell me about it.

When I was out of work and really desperate for a job I went and called. This was the point where I had done the layout for A Dialogue With Solitude. I had the layout mocked up. I showed that to him. He was very impressed with the work and wanted to know when it would be published.  But he said, “I'll never give you a job, you're too good. You know you wouldn't be happy.” He often had people working for him for nothing, they were floor sweepers and such. They could observe but they wouldn't be paid anything.  So with me he was saying, “it wouldn't work out because you're too good to be an assistant to me.” 

At one point I spoke with you about assisting. I was going to do some assisting in Toronto and you said "No, you should just move forward. That's a step backwards for you."

I don't remember that. But it makes sense. Because you were already photographing in a commercial sense, working for the magazines - whereas I wasn't. You see, I've never really done commercial work.

That’s something you've mentioned in class, that you were never a commercial photographer, you never had any intentions of it.  Why not?

There's a book, I forget where I put it, maybe I put it back up there. [pause] I'm not sure where it is. Popular Photography. Somewhere in this period ran some capsulated biographies of young photographers in one issue. I was one of the five. When I was working on the Polaroid project with Robert Frank, Heinecken, and John Wood, Bill Johnson, who was the editor of this project, came across it. He made note that of the five photographers, every one was doing commercial work but me.

I worked as an assistant but I didn't do any commercial photography. So in an semi-conscious way I was defining myself as an artist, if you will, as distinct from a commercial photographer. When I got my first Guggenheim grant, I asked for $4000. I could have survived on that $4000, and made up a budget to that effect. But I only got 3000. So the next year when I made a point in the application of saying I had no other income other than two minor assisting jobs - that I wanted to live on the 4000 and that I wanted to work off of it - then I got the whole thing.

I want to hear more about your assisting experiences. Tell me the story about working for the photographer shooting the “Judgement at Nuremberg” poster.   

That was Carl Fisher. The ads for the movie showed the seven lead figures in silhouette face, overlapping. A whole montage, it was very beautifully done, graphically. Five of them had been shot in Hollywood, Montgomery Clift and Marlene Dietrich were living in New York.

Essentially it was nothing more than a straightforward profile shot. No psychology to it or anything. But it’s like what I was talking about, an artist living their work. The medium is part of their life, it’s not separate. So a request for a profile shot, nothing more than that wasn’t enough for Clift. He had to recall the role that he was playing, he literally started emoting and began living the part in those few moments shooting that one roll of film. And it was amazing. It was very short, I think we were there for half an hour at best. But it intrigued me that he had to assume the character for something as superficial as a back-lit rim lighting profile shot. That’s what I mean by somebody who has to live his art - which is what made him such an extraordinary actor.

Marlene Dietrich, on the other hand, she just sat there. And the lighting was exactly the same. Carl made twelve quick exposures in a row, all virtually alike. What was interesting was that as we were leaving, the messenger came with the 8x10 retouched portraits of her.

It was a different shoot of her?.

Yes. What was interesting was how she went over them. Any little flaw that she didn’t like she made a note of. It had to be a perfect retouching job. Both are expressions of vanity, but for her it was her image vanity, for him it was something more profound and deeper.

Okay, why don’t you talk about New York in the 1950s.

Well, probably it was more civil then. I think the raunchiness, the grottiness didn’t come in until the mid-sixties. I think that New York was still a livable place. A place that you could associate in, at least in the photography world. There wasn’t that pushy competitiveness that there is now. Superstar photographers were still low on the totem poll in terms of the arts.

It was more civilized, because no one could rise to the level of a star?

 Yes. So that you could sit down and talk to each other, and not feel competitive. Well, you needed each other I suppose to support each other, to give a sense of belonging. Because there weren’t the galleries, there weren’t the critics. Jacob Deschun was the only one who had a column in The New York Times every Sunday, but that was just a little column.

You usually refer to those times with a “those were the days” kind of attitude.  

Two or three years ago I was buying underwear in Ralph Lauren at 72nd Street and Madison Avenue. I was standing by the counter waiting for my package. I got into conversation with the woman next to me, somewhat younger than me. And then it became a three-way conversation somehow including the woman behind the counter, who was a black woman in her twenties. It was about New York in the fifties and early sixties - how civil it was. And the young black woman was even saying that. Which amazed me. First of all she was young, yet she still had a sense that it was much more civil back then, I guess even in terms of being black. But there we were talking about the same thing - three different ages, saying how we felt that New York was a more convivial place to be in. So it’s not something I have a nostalgia for, so to speak, it seems to be a condition that really was.

You knew Diane Arbus at that time didn’t you?

Marvin Israel, who put together Diane’s first book, was Art Director for Harper’s Bazaar for a time. He had run a couple of photographer’s portfolios and I approached him with my work. Unfortunately, two months later he quit the job but he evidently told Diane about the work. She called me up one day and said she liked to come over and see it. So she came over and I showed her my work, we talked about it and talked about it.

I saw her a couple of times after that. I was involved with the magazine Contemporary Photographer as an associate editor and we wanted to do a portfolio of Diane’s work. So we made an appointment to speak with her, Lee Lockwood, the editor, and myself. The date of the meeting was November 22, 1963. On 42nd Street the movie theaters played a lot of European films and I had gone to see one that afternoon. It was the one o’clock show so I came out on the street around three o’clock and there were kids on the streets flashing newspapers for sale and shouting “JFK’s been shot!” We had already made the appointment to meet so we met at her place. She had a TV set, so we spent the next 4 hours there just watching. Then we three, along with Amy, went out for coffee where Lee proposed to do a portfolio in the magazine. She turned us down on the same basis or premise that Walker Evans had not published what are called the subway pictures. He was concerned about the issue of invasion of privacy.

You mean that is something she was struggling with at the time?

Oh yeah, there is no question about it.  

What upset me was that, like, two years later she was showing at the Museum of Modern Art. That Szarkowski was good talker, he got through that. I think to her regret again because once the work got up on the wall in public view and the book was published a lot of the reactions to that work being about freaks freaked her out. She was unhappy about that and, I think again it weighed some on her sense of reality. You know, the question of revealing people in a certain way and that revelation being misunderstood, either by the subject or by people in general.

I did see her once or twice after I left New York when I was teaching in Moore College of Art in Philadelphia before I came to Toronto. Moore was an all girls art school and once or twice, may have only been once, took maybe half a dozen girls up to visit her, talk with her at her place.

Her death was a shock, it made me do a lot of thinking about the meaning of one’s work.

Why?

Well, I thought, like when the Beatles split up I expected them to go into eclipse, that people would forget them. I thought that would happen to Diane. And the tragedy of suicide, I mean she was a recognized photographer, she did strong work, she was a true artist in that sense. So why would she commit suicide? What is the issue? If work doesn't keep you going and alive what does? Work didn’t keep her going. It was always an issue for me, the work is what kept me going and preventing me from committing suicide. So it touched a real nerve in me. And out of that I did a slide show, an epiphany, where I used photobooth portraits of myself collaged to things like ads and reproductions of artworks and photos, as a way of expressing the question of an artist’s commitment to work and life and it’s consequences.

When you look at that, at both her and the Beatles, obviously both of them in a way have been magnified by their passing. What’s your thought on that now?

There are other groups that break up or people who commit suicide as artists that we quickly forget. I sense that the work doesn’t sustain itself. The issue is whether people keep harping on the issue of suicide. With Diane’s suicide, some people regarded it as the revenge/punishment by the gods of the bourgeoisie for her having had the courage to transgress their taboos against revealing freaks and the like. Like Prometheus she was made to pay for her transgression. Suicide was her punishment and banishment from the world of the living.

That was the thought at the time?

That it was a transgression. But many people saw it in a positive sense, that she was so brave to transgress, but as a transgressor you suffered...

 That’s so bizarre.

Yeah, I didn’t think that is what her suicide was about, though I can’t claim to know what it really was about. She hadn’t worked for a year before she committed suicide and that’s the issue that needs to be dealt with, what is it that prevented her from working?

Did you read the...

The Bosworth biography? Trash, absolute trash and I don’t just mean about Diane - it’s about bad writing, bad research, bad quoting. And not being able to establish the relationship of the work to the person, or the work to the times. Even when she quotes Garry Winogrand it is one brief sentence that’s shaped to be a negative comment on her character.

I want to know what you think about the work of Sally Mann and Jock Sturges and if you consider that work to be inappropriate.

Oh, I have no problem with it. First of all I like erotic work in both senses, I like bolder eroticism of Sally as much as the almost sweet eroticism of Jock. I find Jock’s work quite pure, quite beautiful, he has a wonderful sense of light. The sense of the people, particularly because his best work is that done in France, the people are more open. He has done work in California but it doesn’t have the same openness as the French work has.

I am upset with the kind of shit Jock had to go through where they confiscated his enlargers and prints and didn’t return them for months on end. It’s a weird thing. They will take a drug dealers automobile because he uses it to transport drugs so they take the photographers enlarger because he has printed these so called pornographic pictures with it. But it prevented him from doing any work professionally and economically.

Do you think that there is question of him photographing people that are underage and therefore not really responsible for themselves?

No, because again as I understand from what I am reading there in the text, the young people he’s photographing are from within families or that it is done with the permission of the family. Often he photographs family relationships, mother/daughter. I don’t know what this underage...Romeo and Juliet are thirteen and fourteen years old, they are underage...

But that’s just a story...

No, no when I was thirteen I was Bar Mitzvahed. At the end of the ceremony you say, “today I am a man.” Now why thirteen? It is when you reach puberty, you are capable of ejaculating semen into a woman and make her pregnant with children. And women at that age are ready to be and receive and bear children. So in the old days you were reproducing at thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old. You were starting a family, you took on adult responsibilities because you usually didn’t live past fifty anyhow if even that. So what I am saying, what does it really mean that a sixteen year old male or female, or even if you mean the younger children, didn’t they all have their parents’ consent? And the  kids who are now adults wonder what all the fuss is about because there was nothing special, no sexual implications in the act of being photographed, only the aesthetic terms of the artist. Jock’s work is a celebration of the body, the body beautiful, the sensuousness of light and flesh. Nakedness is supposed to be open, direct and honest and childlike. So all that nattering prudishness is nothing but bullshit.

With Sally it’s a different story, not in the sense of any kind transgression, but in the sense of the mood of the work. Where as Jock is, as I say, sweet. Sally is demonic. Her work is about the dark side of sexuality. That’s why they make a wonderful pair in a sense of how they are approaching sexuality from different directions. I am more moved by Sally’s work because of the darkness, I can respond to that more. But the sexuality of Jock’s work is more erotic for me. Sally’s work is not erotic in any way but it’s dark sexuality colored by her fears, wherever they may have come from. It’s only hinted at in the introduction to book where she talks about her father and how he made sculptures out of feces and painted them white.

Do you ever see your own work as being erotic or sexual in any way?

Well, sexual at any rate, seeing as how my regard for women in my work borders almost on the obsessive, something which came clear to me with A Dialogue With Solitude. Something I read recently, Svetlana Alpers on Rubens, gave me something of a clue to this. She purports that Rubens’ depiction of women was an issue of identification and not of dominance and possession, a condition of erotics where a man aspires to and acknowledges himself to be in the condition of woman. This rings true for me. Also in my case it’s something of the condition of wanting to bond with the body of the lost mother, of wanting to understand the necessity of her abandonment.

Image: Dave Heath, in front of his home in Toronto, 1999.