Face to Face (171)

The ethnic diversity of China is tremendous. The faces of the people you meet in the street are as varied as those you will meet anywhere in the world. But everywhere, there are two distinct groups--the young and the old. Two Chinas. One reflects the Cultural Revolution, one the New Prosperity.

Text and photos by William Schmidt

Manhattan story

When I am in Manhattan, I usually go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday morning, then go to a good deli--Marche on Madison--and get some food to take to the park. Somehow, it seems, I always end up sitting on the same bench. A couple of years ago, as I was finishing lunch, I looked across Central Park and saw a tall building with two towers. "That is where Mia Farrow lives," I thought. I remembered that Woody Allen lived directly across the park and that the two of them would talk on the phone looking at one another through telescopes. "This must be Woody Allen's building that I am sitting in front of," I ruminated as I got up to throw away my trash. And as I stood, I bumped into a small fellow walking on the sidewalk. It was Woody Allen. I am a fan, of course, but I do not like to bother people, so I said simply, "Oh, sorry." He looked at me through those heavy glasses, mouth slightly ajar, moving away without speaking. He was with his daughter/wife, Soon-Yi.

The next day, Sunday afternoon, I was going back to the apartment in which I was staying on the Upper East Side. Manhattan is beautiful then, like a quiet museum, like a movie set without a crew, lonely, deserted. I had crossed Park Avenue and was heading east, and as I turned a corner, I ran into a lone couple. We three were the only people to be seen. It was Wood Allen and Soon-Yi. They remembered me, it seemed, and began moving away like crabs stranded on a beach. A stalker, no doubt. "No, no!" I wanted to shout out, but I only moved along.

I told that story for years. This weekend, it received an update. It was Sunday, and I had just finished a visit to the Met (not Saturday, I know, but this was a holiday weekend), and had just finished lunching in the park. And walking back to my subway stop, I once again ran into Woody and Soon-Yi. I had a Leica M7 slung over my shoulder, and I thought about the F Blog. Still, I do not like to bother people and am not enamored by simple fame. Suddenly, though, I turned and followed to snap some photos as they walked. I felt creepy, like Paparazzi, but it was only from behind, I told myself. As I walked along, however, I had the impulse to photograph them face to face. Just as I caught them at the corner, however, the batteries in my camera went dead. I thought of all the purist who buy only mechanical cameras like the Leica MP. - text and photo ©William Schmidt

William Schmidt on Kerouac's road (6)

In enchantment there is no disorder, no unwanted chaos, no dishes to clean, no noise. In the vision of dreams we permit ourselves this luxury of simplicity. We float alone with our beloved desires, each tangent an extension of the simple pleasure. Each detail pulls us back towards our lives, placing us with things known. So, we return back to the one thing. We find it changed, out of place. We reduce, we focus, we return as well as we can to the simple vision.

Then there are the troubled dreams of others. Enchantment might involve being alone but not loneliness. Euphoria is the falling away of anxieties rather than the accumulation of them. Details tend to bring uncertainty rather than happiness.

Still we derive some strange pleasure from looking at these stark images. An odd pleasure, but it is there. The eye never tires... but what of the mind. Is there a limit to its capacity for vision? And what uncrowded feeling is this?

Is there a sharing of the journey, the recognition of oneself in another, maybe a stranger, one long gone, alone, without the need for agreement, understanding, or pity. Through these images we are perhaps able to simplify the dreams of others. We see them in their world but also extract them from it, and we extract from it something else as well. We steal away with the secret in a single glance.

In these pictures the subjects either seem widowed from their own dreams or perhaps lost in them. Within this fixed world the plight is hardly shared. There is here a paucity of hope, a drifting away rather than a floating towards, a space between. One measure of tragedy is the distance between what we could have hoped for with what we actually get.

Photos by William Schmidt, essay by Sean Cusick

Jim Harrison, Writer

In 1996, I attended a writing conference in Key West whose guest authors included Rick Bass, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, John Nichols, Doug Peacock, Peter Matthiessen, and Gary Snyder. Snyder and Matthiessen were prevented from coming by huge winter storms that stopped air traffic west of Colorado. I had looked forward to seeing them, though I had met Mr. Mattiessen several times before. Still, the conference was a hoot, and Jim Harrison and his old friend, Tom McGuane, stole the show. It was by sheer dint of intelligence that they were able to do so. They are geniuses, that much was evident and clear, each in his own way.

McGuane, handsome and intense, seemed focussed and irritated as he listened to other authors speaking while Harrison seemed laconic and bored. Just when you thought that he might have fallen into sleep, however, he would espouse some learned gem that made the afternoon worthwhile. Harrison wore the same jacket and t-shirt each day, both frayed and dirty. He was large, leaning toward amorphous, but there was a broken power in his presence that seemed, even in its diminished form, greater than mere mortal.

I took this photograph just before a very frail, elderly lady introduced herself. It was John Steinbeck's widow, and she had been in the audience for a number of days, unrecognized and unnoticed. I had only my Olympus XA with its attached flash, and the automatic exposure caught something in the foreground, so the picture I took turned out to be unprintable. It was an historic occasion and it is lost.

There is nothing intimate about this portrait, nothing to recommend it but the fierce presence of this author. We see him here a gourmand and a glutton, plagued by gout, limping as he walked with the aid of a cane, his famous wandering eye pointing toward some distant star, his fierce passions at last overtaking him. He once said, "I no longer know if I am thinking or writing." I look into that one good eye and begin to understand.
Text and photo: Wiliam Schmidt

If you want to know more about Jim Harrison, this interview in The Morning News (2004) could be a good start.

William Schmidt on Kerouac's road (5) - in technicolour

My "Journey Around America" was both picaresque and picturesque. I was still young enough to cry when I left my girlfriend and to spend the night traveling in the front row of a Greyhound holding close to a girl I just met on the way to New Orleans. She gave me her address and told me to call visit when I came to Vancouver. Out of New Orleans, I met another girl who asked me to sit with her. I was going to Houston and she to Dallas. She offered to let me stay with her there, but the wife of a middle-aged Jewish couple (she kept screaming, "Look, Ira, he looks just like a blue-eyed Jesus") told me her sister was picking them up and I could spend the night with them. I said goodbye to the girl from Dallas and went to a rough cowboy bar near the bus station and had my first Lone Star beer. When the sister showed up, Ira said goodbye to me and I was left alone with some very big, unfriendly fellows.

Walking back to the bus station in the growing dusk, I was told to watch myself, that it was dangerous around there after dark and that I could be killed for my backpack and my boots. I looked into the shadows and in my young boy's imagination, I could see it happening. I decided to take the bus onto Denver at midnight. In the bus station, a sweet, nervous man struck up a conversation with me and told me he lived nearby, that I could come to his house, that he would play piano for me and I could shower. As badly as I needed to shower, I had to decline the offer.
Overnight to Denver. I was going to sleep in my tent in a campground and after touring the city that morning, I took a city bus to the edge of town. The campground was a desolate camper and trailer park where I was offered a plot by a drainage ditch. I sat up my tent, and lay down to rest, but I felt absurd, and so to Boulder, meeting a girl on the bus who said I could sleep on her balcony, and I did, poorly, the first night in my new down sleeping bag. She took me to breakfast and that night to a bar where they refused to serve Indians where I played pool and bought beer for Native Americans.

The west was different, and I was in love. Lonely roads hitching through Wyoming and Montanna, sleeping in a small, dingy room in Butte where I was offered a job as a bouncer in a cowboy bar. It must have been a joke. Buffalo, antelope, deer. On to Yellowstone where I rented a car with a psychologist from South Africa, a mathematician from China, a physicist from India, and a college student from the U.S. They thrilled me with their enthusiasm ("I want to see Old Faceful", cried the mathematician while the physicist flipped the through radio stations like a madman, irritating the psychologist who drove). When they left I camped and hiked along the Yellowstone river on the last day the park was open, scared and lost, sloshing through sloughs and crashing through tall grass, singing and clapping my hands to keep away the bears. Oregon where I fell asleep on the lawn of the University in Eugene, waking to a fellow playing guitar. Marijuana had been legalized, though the restaurants had signs that said, "No Smoking or Toking." A big, beefy guy offered to take the guitar player and me back to his house where we would make spaghetti and drink from a gallon jug of wine. In the morning, we made a big, lazy breakfast and he called in sick to work. Later, his wife drove me out to the highway. Vancouver. I went to see the girl from the first night on the bus, a month gone by, but she was not home. Lovely neighborhood. A hippie family picked me up and we ate together. They told me I must go to Vancouver Island and they drove me to the ferry station. We glided through cold water, piney islands, past Joni Mitchell's house someone said.

I met a girl who is going to cross the island to meet some friends. We would go together we decided. It was dark when we de- board. We met a diamond miner who took us to dinner and told us he had a room for the night; we could sleep on the floor. In the morning, we hitchhiked across the island, up winding roads through lovely wilderness, one Winnobega passing us again and again without picking us up, rides with loggers and fishermen, down toward the wild Pacific. The beach was littered with giant logs. We pitched a tent and made dinner. All about the beach, fires glowed. Communion.

The next day we went to a dock where a boat would come to take her to Cat Island. She asked me if I would like to go. Cat Island. Young and fearful, I said no. The boat arrived, she turned and waved. Later I learned from a local fisherman that Cat Island was a commune of artists and professors. Then I was alone, the way back much harder. I shared a room with three women in Seattle more worldly than I, who scare me wickedly.

Down the coast. California, hitchhiking in big sunlight, catching a ride with a fellow in an open van who picks up everyone he sees, a rolling party. In San Francisco I stay in Haight/ Ashbury in a big old Victorian house owned by a religious sect. At night I go to North Beach, to City Light Books, to jazz clubs, and walk those Beat streets. Hitching to Yosemite, I meet a girl. We get a ride in a semi driver taking a load of construction goods to the park. We set up my tent but that night it rains, filling the tent with water and mud.

Reno, Nevada, The Biggest Little City in America, where I gamble for the first time. Free drinks, I lose more money than I can afford. Sleep in a youth hostel on the outskirts of town. Sick for three days, burning fever, hallucinations. I go to hospital. Broke, I begin the last leg of my journey. New York City. I get off the bus at 42nd Street at noon. Suddenly, a cute girl takes my arm. "You want a date?" At first I am puzzled. "Twenty for me, five for the room." "You can't do that to hippies," I tell her, and with a laugh she is gone. Then all the money is gone.

Home. I must find a job. I am about to enter another world.

text and pictures by William Schmidt

Tennessee Williams

Photo: William Schmidt, 1975
One day walking by a bookstore, I ran into a crowd of people, and I went over to see what was going on. Tennessee Williams was autographing his newest book. I think it was his autobiography. There were guards at the door keeping the crowd on the sidewalk. I walked up with my camera hoping to get a picture and nobody stopped me. Inside there was a long line. I walked around it and sat in front of Williams and snapped about ten photos. He and I talked a bit, silly stuff. I met him again a few years later in Key West. He was with a couple companions, young fellows. Again we spoke. I always tell people that I was drunk and said, "Hey Ten, give me five," but it is not true. He seemed to be a very nice man and he had the most wonderful voice I ever heard come out of a human mouth.

William Schmidt on Kerouac's road (4)

William Schmidt on Kerouac's road (3)

continuation of Bill Schmidt's saga from 1975; see also William essay about those pictures

William Schmidt on Kerouac's road (2)

continuation of Bill Schmidt's saga from 1975, see also former post with explination

stay tuned, more pictures will come soon

William Schmidt on Kerouac's road: People in places

In 1975, after graduating from college, I set out to discover Kerouac's road. With only my camera as a companion, I travelled through America for three months. I hitchhiked and took Greyhound buses, camped, stayed in hostels and missions and with whomever invited me. It was a great adventure.

William Schimdt's self portrait in the bus.

When I ran out of money, I returned home and had to get a job. I continued to photograph for a while, but eventually put my camera away. The photographs and negatives were put into a box and stored at my mother's house. When she moved twenty-five years later, she threw the box away. All that remains are some fading proof sheets which I have scanned. Everything else is gone but the memories.

The photos fascinate me for a number of reasons. They seem ironic now, both intimate and distant. Though the quality of the images is marred, their subjects and subjectivity present what Maria Kroenenberg calls "a vision felt", an "illustration of mood." Life's great paradox is that one both becomes in and is destroyed by time. In time's twisted logic, gaining is losing. We are, by and large, who we remember ourselves to be, but memory is infamously unreliable.

My memory of what occurred when I made these pictures has been shaped by the events that have followed. I may only recall, not retreat into this past. Like these photographs, the memories of that time are veiled, mysterious, and, perhaps, even beginning to attain the semblance of myth. "I was there," I tell myself. There is evidence. The photos represent a time of innocence and exist now only in cyberspace, a series of zeros and ones, intangible but sensible, an X-Ray of a spirit.

Bachelard says that we remember people in places. When we see faces we can't recall, we say that we can't place them. Here are some portraits I made on that trip. People in places.


F blog was honoured by William and offered possibility of showing his unique, personal, historical already pictures. Thank you William, this is very special for us.

We will show William Schmidt's works in several posts.

Stay tune/Marcin

More of William's works you may find on his blog.