{"id":155307,"date":"2021-10-18T11:27:08","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T15:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=155307"},"modified":"2021-10-19T12:51:05","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T16:51:05","slug":"eavesdropping-in-the-archives-six-artist-portraits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/10\/18\/eavesdropping-in-the-archives-six-artist-portraits\/","title":{"rendered":"Eavesdropping in the Archives: Six Artist Portraits"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The following photographs are taken from the archives of Lester Sloan, who was a photojournalist for <\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0where he documented the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the O. J. Simpson trial, from the late sixties until the mid-nineties. The captions are transcribed conversations between Lester and his daughter, the writer Aisha Sabatini Sloan. They have been edited for concision. They are offered here in the spirit of an eavesdropped conversation. While this is a work of nonfiction, the stories relayed here are recollections, prone to the vicissitudes of memory over time. Aisha\u2019s questions and prompts to her father appear in bold. Lester\u2019s thoughts are set in a lighter typeface.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

BALLET LESSONS<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hoop dreams. You know where this picture was taken? Around the corner from my mother\u2019s house, I think. No\u2014across the street. The house that used to be across the street from my mother\u2019s house. Where Mr. Ringo\u2019s house used to be. Mr. Ringo was the guy who lived across the street from us, and I used to cut his grass and help clean up his house for extra money, and I always enjoyed that because he had a magazine I\u2019d never seen before. He got National Geographic <\/em>delivered to his door, and he also had other magazines like Life <\/em>and Look<\/em>. But he was a reader of magazines and books. This is such a colorful picture. <\/strong>It is. Think about the control you have to have to dribble a ball, pick it up, jump up, pull your arms up as far as you can to overreach the guy trying to block your shot, put the right arch on it so it\u2019ll go over his fingertips and into the ring of the basket. It didn\u2019t surprise me later on when a few basketball players started taking ballet lessons because they discovered that the body control you need to be a great dancer is the same body control you need to develop as a ballplayer. You look at this and realize it\u2019s possible for a kid from the hood to be Nureyev.<\/p>\n

MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I\u00a0think about this\u2014look at this picture\u2014I\u00a0think, Here\u2019s the guy who leaps six feet in the air, it seems, and does a pose, but even when he\u2019s sitting on the floor he can do something that draws attention to himself. That one finger seems to be one of the signature motions of his genius. He was just. And I\u2019m sure that\u2014all the ways they could\u2014they could have been holding hands and all that, but this one finger touching draws your eye to\u2014into\u2014the picture, like a street sign or something saying, no standing here<\/span> or right turn only<\/span>. Like the Sistine Chapel.<\/b> Okay, I\u00a0see what you\u2019re talking about. What do you think?<\/b> Hmm? What do you think?<\/b> I\u00a0see. I\u00a0see it.<\/p>\n

DAVID HOCKNEY AND HIS MOTHER<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Olympic Committee hired me to shoot all the people making posters for the \u201984<\/span> Summer Olympics, and David Hockney was one of them. What do you remember about David Hockney? <\/b>He wasn\u2019t full of himself, he was just \u201cWanna see what I\u2019ve been doing lately? What do you think?\u201d David Hockney was showing you his collages? <\/b>At the time I thought, This is sorta crazy. Building a narrative with images. His mother was there? What do you remember about that? <\/b>She was a lady who loved her son and her son worshiped his mother. I didn\u2019t ask, What is the living arrangement here? Is she here all the time? or anything like that. [Both laugh.<\/i>] Were you a fan of his work? <\/b>Yeah. I liked that it was ordinary people doing ordinary things. It was sort of like scenes that a baby would create. How so? <\/b>Their simplicity. It wasn\u2019t a drawing or a painting of Superman, it was just a guy that jumped into the swimming pool. Did you see the picture he made of his mother: the collage? <\/b>I love it. What do you like about it? <\/b>It reminds me of pictures I took of my mother sitting on the porch, sometimes by herself, sometimes with Aunt Cora Mae. It just represents a moment. There was a guy in the neighborhood who took care of my mother, and, no pun intended, he would kill for her. What do you mean, \u201cNo pun intended\u201d? <\/b>[Laughs.<\/i>] Did he? <\/b>I asked him once, \u201cWhat\u2019s the deal with you coming around here, hanging around my mother?\u201d He said, \u201cYou know, when I was in jail, my mother died, and they wouldn\u2019t let me out to come and see her. So I picked somebody to be a mother to me, and it was your mother.\u201d Well, that\u2019s a pretty full-circle story. <\/b>That\u2019s what art does for you: it takes you on a journey.<\/p>\n

DR. SEUSS<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I took your grandmother to visit Dr. Seuss. And we sat in his living room and watched the whales migrate to the south. You could see the whales out his living-room window. He was on the ocean?<\/b> He lived near San Diego. The ocean was his backyard. Didn\u2019t you have a story about a student who said something about Dr. Seuss? <\/b>Oh, this was a Black student. He said Dr. Seuss taught him how to rhyme. Rap. Why do you ask? Because some of his books have been called racist.<\/b> Before white kids started to rap, they said rapping was racist. I\u00a0don\u2019t think people would call rap racist today.<\/b> But once upon a time they said that. Do you not believe that Dr. Seuss is racist? <\/b>I wasn\u2019t a Dr. Seuss fan or anything. I just photographed him. He was cordial. I can\u2019t say that I\u2019ve read everything he\u2019s written. It\u2019s interesting, right? That he could have had that positive effect on your student at the same time as he was doing some harm?<\/b> Lyndon Johnson was a racist, he called people n*****<\/span>s and then he passed the Civil Rights bill. People are complicated. Once, I\u00a0was staying with a friend and he had to run out for a second\u2014I was using the phone and I was looking for a pen and paper, and on the paper was something he had written about a colleague who happened to be Black, and he called him a jive ass n*****<\/span>. So, when he married [Black celebrity], he was very happy to become the best friend of the American Negro. Ah, the hell with \u2019im. Is he still alive? <\/b>Don\u2019t know. This is a person who married [Black celebrity]?<\/b> Yes. So, can I name this guy?<\/b> Oh no. Why?<\/b> First of all, what business did I\u00a0have reading his mail?<\/p>\n

CASABLANCA<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was Rodney\u2019s idea to put the cigarette in his hand. He didn\u2019t smoke it or anything, I\u00a0don\u2019t think he smokes to this day. The picture reflects the father more than the son, though the son takes good instruction. He was an old soul then. I\u00a0guess he was about ten or eleven at the time. What do you mean it reflects the father? What does it reflect of Rodney? <\/b>Rodney was always about the movies. You give him the name of a movie, or a star or an incident, and he will tell you more about the picture than you actually want to know sometimes. He\u2019s\u2014we had a mutual friend who used to refer to Rodney not by name but by \u201cJust like in the movies.\u201d Rodney was a movie fanatic. We were playing that the other day, we were talking about movies, who starred in Shane<\/i>, and he gave me the name of the star, when the movie was made. That\u2019s one thing about him that never changed. He may have gotten older. Smoking was something, a habit, he may have gotten from watching some of his favorite movie stars. You light up a cigarette and then he\u2019ll mention a movie, and then he was off. What\u2019s his favorite movie? <\/b>If I\u00a0were to guess, it would be a movie that\u2014not Humphrey Bogart but, um, I\u00a0can see the singer in the movie, who was a very famous Black entertainer in New York. Casablanca<\/i>? <\/b>Casablanca<\/i>. Was Rodney like this when you were kids? <\/b>Rodney was never a kid. He was always Rodney. Even now that Rodney is eighty years old, he\u2019s still a kid. You said he was never a kid. <\/b>He was never a kid, he was always a character from some movie he had seen, or, even when he was a younger person, he was always living a scene from one of his favorite movies. I\u00a0remember once I\u00a0called him, I\u00a0had a habit of calling Rodney wherever I\u00a0went in the world. Once, I\u00a0was in Paris, I\u00a0was on the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, and he said, \u201cWhat are we drinking?\u201d And I\u00a0said, \u201cGlass of wine, Macs.\u201d<\/p>\n

RICHARD PRYOR<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s at a press conference with Jackie Gleason. It doesn\u2019t really look like him.<\/b> That\u2019s when he made the movie The Toy<\/i>. What\u2019d he say about it? <\/b>He said he made it because he owed somebody a favor. It wasn\u2019t his favorite movie. Think about it. He said, \u201cI\u2019m supposed to be the toy of some white kid.\u201d It\u2019s sorta degrading. Did you take a picture of him during that stand-up act when he was wearing the bodysuit?<\/b> A line from his own mouth: \u201cI didn\u2019t have to give up a thing to get this TV<\/span> show.\u201d And he\u2019s standing there with apparently no genitalia. Do you think he seems ashamed?<\/b> No, I\u00a0don\u2019t. You know, a lot of this came at a time when Richard Pryor was thinking about his image: \u201cI\u2019m not going to use the N-word again, because it\u2019s derogatory. I\u2019m not going to do anything to bring shame to the race and also bring shame to me.\u201d So it was\u2014I\u00a0think he was probably questioning a lot of things he was doing and saying. I\u00a0took that picture when I\u00a0took a picture of Richard Pryor for the cover of Newsweek<\/i>. <\/i>Did you try to search for his <\/b>TV<\/b><\/span> show in your Maps app?<\/b> No, I\u00a0typed it into Google. That\u2019s the Maps app<\/b>. Well. It told me the year his TV show came out.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lester Sloan worked as a staff photographer for\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek\u00a0for twenty-five years, received\u00a0a 1976 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University,\u00a0and has worked as a contributor for various publications, including\u00a0<\/em>Emerge and NPR\u2019s <\/em>Weekend Edition.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Aisha Sabatini Sloan\u00a0is the author of the essay collections\u00a0<\/em>The Fluency of Light,<\/em> Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit,\u00a0<\/em>Borealis,<\/em>\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Captioning the Archives. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Michigan. Her column for the <\/em>Daily, Detroit Archives<\/a>, received the 2021 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.<\/em><\/p>\n

Captioning the Archives, with text by Aisha Sabatini Sloan and photographs by Lester Sloan, will be released by McSweeney’s in November 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A photographer discusses his pictures of Richard Pryor, Dr. Seuss, and others.<\/p>\n

A photographer and his daughter look back at his pictures of Richard Pryor, David Hockney, and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30918],"tags":[31273,15006,5869,67827,68298,29707,100,7604],"class_list":["post-155307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-photography","tag-aisha-sabatini-sloan","tag-david-hockney","tag-dr-seuss","tag-featured","tag-lester-sloan","tag-on-photography","tag-photography","tag-richard-pryor"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEavesdropping in the Archives: Six Artist Portraits by Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Lester Sloan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 18, 2021 \u2013 A photographer discusses his pictures of Richard Pryor, Dr. Seuss, and others. 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